CentBrowser

Description

CentBrowser is a free Windows browser based on Chromium by a small Chinese development team under the name of Cent Studio. The browser exists in the same space as browsers like Vivaldi — power users who find Chrome too plain and want more built-in tools without installing a pile of extensions. Mouse gestures, a scrollable tab bar, a boss key, per-tab incognito, super drag — features that Google has never bothered putting into Chrome are here by default.

The audience is specific. CentBrowser appeals to Windows users who recall when browsers fought for features and not simplicity, and want the features back without switching to a browser that takes a lengthy setup process. It runs Chrome extensions without modification, renders pages just like Chrome does, and accepts a Google account login for sync. The difference lies in the extras built upon.

One thing that any potential user should understand up front: CentBrowser is not updated very often. Looking at the version history, there were only a few major releases in 2024, one in August 2023, and one in January 2023 before that. The latest release as of August 2025 is based on Chromium 132. Chrome itself reached version 132 in early 2025 and was well past it by mid-year. That gap is important from a security perspective. Users who are comfortable with that tradeoff will find a capable browser. Users that need to stay up to date with Chromium security patches will not.

FEATURES

Mouse gestures are the feature that is mentioned first by most users. Holding the right mouse button and drawing a direction stroke — down, right, up-then-right — causes browser actions: close tab, go back, open a new tab. The complete set covers most common browsing tasks and each gesture has a configurable action associated with it. It’s faster than reaching for keyboard shortcuts once the motions become instinct.

Super Drag is an extension of the drag mechanic. Dragging a link drops it into a new tab. Dragging selected text performs a search for it. Dragging an image saves or searches an image. These are actions that normally require right-click menus or keyboard combinations and doing them with a single drag gesture speeds up workflows that involve a lot of link-following or text lookups.

The tab bar scrolls horizontally instead of compressing tabs when there are lots of them open. Chrome shortens the labels of tabs as more tabs are added until they become too small to read. CentBrowser has tabs of a fixed width and adds a scrollbar instead, so labels don’t disappear when many tabs are open.

Incognito Tab opens a private browsing session within the normal browser window as a tab, instead of opening a separate incognito window. This allows users to switch between normal and private tabs in the same window without context switching to another browser window.

Lazy Session Loading is used to delay the restoration of tabs when the application is launched. When CentBrowser opens with a saved session of many tabs, it doesn’t open all the pages at once — it opens tabs as the user actually visits them. This makes starting up fast even when restoring dozens of tabs, and avoids the CPU spike that comes from a browser simultaneously loading twenty pages.

The Boss Key sets a keyboard shortcut to immediately hide all CentBrowser windows. One press and the browser disappears off the screen and the taskbar. Another press restores it. The use cases are situational but the users wanting the feature know why they want it.

The QR Code Generator is used to generate a scannable code for any URL or text directly in the browser. This saves a step when transferring a page from desktop to phone without a sync account.

Auto-hide Bookmarks Bar The bookmarks bar stays hidden until the user hovers over the top of the window. It pops up again on demand and hides again when the cursor moves away. This is a small thing, but it takes back a row of vertical space in a browser that otherwise looks like Chrome.

The Translate Selection context menu option allows the user to right-click on selected text to translate the text on the fly. This works regardless of what search engine the user has set as their default.

CentBrowser is 100% portable and can be run from a USB drive without installation. Users can take the browser on a flash drive and run it on any Windows machine without leaving traces in the registry or application list of the host system.

EXTENSIONS AND Compatibility

CentBrowser supports all Chrome Web Store extensions. The Chromium base means that any extension that works in Chrome works here without modification. Users who use extensions such as uBlock Origin, password managers or developer tools can install them in the same way as they would in Chrome.

Google account sign-in is used for bookmark and settings sync using Google’s Chromium sync infrastructure. This allows those who already use Chrome to sync their data across machines using the same Google account, without having to manually migrate their setup.

PRIVACY SETTINGS

CentBrowser includes a number of privacy options that Chrome lacks in its main settings. Users can set the browser to clear cache, cookies, history, and browsing data automatically when exiting the browser, without having to use an extension to do it. The browser can disable autofill suggestions, suppress Google’s reporting of usage statistics, and limit the prefetch requests that Chrome normally sends when the user types in the address bar.

The browser does not make the same level of independent privacy commitments as dedicated privacy browsers like Firefox, Brave or Waterfox. Cent Studio has not published any telemetry audit. The developer is a small Chinese team that has limited public transparency on what the browser does or doesn’t send. Users who require verifiable privacy assurances should be wary. Users mostly interested in behavioral convenience features — auto-clearing on exit, disabling autofill — will find what they’re looking for.

WINDOWS COMPATIBILITY

CentBrowser explicitly supports Windows 7 and Windows 8, which were abandoned years ago by mainstream browsers. Google dropped Windows 7 and 8 support with Chrome 110 in early 2023; Microsoft Edge dropped them in the same year. CentBrowser still has 32-bit and 64-bit installers for both operating systems. For users still running older hardware on those platforms, this is often their only option for a Chromium-based browser that still gets any updates at all.

SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS

The main issue with CentBrowser is how often it is updated. Chrome’s major security patches are released every four weeks. CentBrowser’s history indicates that major updates come in months apart — sometimes half a year or more. Running on an older version of Chromium means running with known, publicly revealed vulnerabilities that Google has already patched in Chrome but Cent Studio has not yet addressed. Google publishes Chromium security issues in detail after Chrome patches them. A browser several versions behind has those vulnerabilities in the open.

Cent Studio does not publish a security policy nor a track record of how fast it responds to critical Chromium CVEs between major releases. Some power users in the community have figured out how to manually update the chrome.dll component in between official releases to close the gap, but this requires technical confidence and is not officially supported.

For browsing low risk sites, and the specific use case of keeping an older Windows machine running with something better than its last supported Chrome version, CentBrowser has a real purpose. For any browsing that involves financial accounts, personal data, or anything sensitive, the lag on security makes it a poor choice.