Thread: SafeCentral

MODERN BROWSERS ARE DESIGNED to make Web surfing fun and easy. But when managing your bank account or paying bills online, you want security, not jollity. That's where Authentium's SafeCentral comes in. It offers a stripped-down, armored-up browser whose one goal is to keep your online transactions private.

The SafeCentral browser is based on Firefox, but it's seriously simplified to avoid leaving security holes. Anything unnecessary or potentially dangerous is gone. With SafeCentral, your home page is hard-coded to Safe Central's portal page, which lists thousands of verified banking and shopping sites. You choose your Favorites from the list, and they show up on a 3D virtual deck of cards with company logos; one click takes you to a site. SafeCentral does not include a password manager, so you'll have to log in. to secure sites manually. Also, unfortunately, it doesn't take advantage of the antiphishing feature built into Firefox, and it can't protect you from phishing e-mails. But it did a thorough job on my tests of blocking a wide variety of monitoring activities.



To protect your private information, SafeCentral suspends other functions while you're browsing. Clicking on the desktop brings you back to those other activities-but suspends SafeCentral, so malware can't meddle with what you're doing within SafeCentral. The protections in SafeCentral make it noticeably slower to load sites than other browsers, so it's not for casual surfing. But for online banking and other business it's worth the wait