WhiteHat’s Aviator combines excellent features with the popular Disconnect plugin.
It's certainly good strategy for a company that makes firewall, anti-malware and internet security suites to have its own browser. But it's more than just a marketing tool, providing a highly customised version of Chromium with its own visual theme, improved security settings, and a collection of default extensions from Comodo itself.
Among the settings is the integration of what Comodo calls Secure DNS -- using its own network of DNS servers, Comodo claims it can improve security by detecting and blocking known malicious websites, reduce exposure to DNS Cache Provisioning attacks, and increase page load performance through DNS over its worldwide network. During installation, the user can elect to use Secure DNS system-wide for all applications, or just the Comodo Dragon browser. It's certainly a nice touch, though in a business environment some of these concerns should already be mitigated by other software.
Interestingly, the Do Not Track and disabling HTTP referrer tracking are not enabled by default, which is probably no surprise as Dragon appears to have an arrangement with Yahoo!, sporting it as default homepage and search engine.
The bundled extensions include the Web Inspector, which opens a new tab and analyses a webpage for malicious activity by testing for a wide range of exploits that cover everything from drive-by downloads and trojans through to phishing and suspicious code; and PrivDog, which works much like Disconnect to analyse a webpage and strip out or block known ad networks, trackers, third-party cookies, and analytics. It's worth noting, however, that the default configuration still allows 'Trusted ads' ads from AdTrustMedia, but can PrivDog can be configured to block all ad networks.
Two other extensions are included which allow you to easily share web pages via social networks with its Comodo Share Page Service, and easily download and save locally streaming media from sites like YouTube with one click using the Comodo Media Download. It also sports a plugin that allows you to drag-and-drop text either directly to share on social media, or to lookup using search engines or Wikipedia.
While Chrome and Chromium are cross-platform, Comodo Dragon is only available for Windows, and comes in an optional portable version to save data to its own directory instead of system-wide.
If you replace the default Yahoo! search engine with one of the more secure options we cover below, it's all round not a bad browser that comes with some nice additions in the security and privacy space.
