Mi Browser

Mi Browser is the browser that comes with the phone. It is the default on Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO devices sold outside China, which is how its Google Play listing passed a billion installs — most of them from people who never chose it. It is Chromium underneath, so pages render as they do in Chrome, but it is closed source and exists only on Android.

What it offers is practical rather than ambitious. An ad blocker is one switch away in settings, reader mode cleans up most articles, and it saves pages as PDFs and downloads videos from social media posts — small things Chrome for Android does not do. Bookmarks, history and open tabs sync through Xiaomi Cloud.

The privacy record is the reason it sits at the bottom of our ratings. Xiaomi's own privacy white paper lists advertising identifiers among what the browser collects. In 2020 Forbes reported that it sent browsing activity to Xiaomi's servers even in incognito mode; Xiaomi disputed the report, then added a setting to stop it that users have to switch on themselves. India banned the app the same year, and Lithuania's cyber security centre criticised its analytics in 2021. If you keep it on a Xiaomi phone, switch off personalised services and ads in its settings; if privacy matters to you, install Firefox, Brave or DuckDuckGo and make it the default.