Yandex Browser

Description

Yandex created its browser for the same reason Google created Chrome: to protect its search engine. By 2012, Google Chrome had become the most popular browser in Russia, and all Chrome users who searched the web defaulted to Google Search. Yandex had most of the Russian search market at the time but was watching Chrome quietly chip away at that advantage. The solution was simple — create a browser with Yandex Search in-built, then provide it with enough features to make it worth using on its own merits.

Yandex Browser was released in October 2012. Like Chrome, it is based on Chromium. Like Chrome, it has the look and feel of a modern browser. But from the beginning Yandex layered in services that made sense for Russian-speaking users: tight integration with Yandex Mail, Yandex Music, Yandex Maps and Yandex’s translation services. The browser became a gateway into the Yandex ecosystem, with a new tab page that serves as a personal dashboard to those services.

Today Yandex Browser has about 21 percent of the desktop browser market in Russia, and is the second most popular browser in Russia after Chrome. Outside Russia and the former Soviet states, there is little usage — the browser barely registers in global statistics. That geographic profile is both a statement of what it is and who Yandex built it for.

Yandex itself underwent significant structural change in 2024. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Dutch holding company that owned Yandex’s parent structure sold its Russian assets to a consortium of Russian investors for about $5.4 billion. The Dutch entity changed its name to Nebius Group and left Russia. The Russian operations are still going on under the name IJSC Yandex, which is now fully domestically owned. The browser is part of those Russian operations.

THE BROWSER’S CORE FEATURES

SmartBox is the combined address and search bar of Yandex, which is equivalent to the Omnibox of Chrome. Typing a partial URL navigates to the site; anything else is a Yandex Search. SmartBox has a built-in keyboard layout correction: if a Russian user types a URL with the keyboard left in Cyrillic mode — resulting in something like “p’f.pshchshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu.zshchpdu This is a small feature that solves a real, common frustration.

Tableau is the new tab page. It displays frequently visited sites in the form of visual tiles, a news feed, widgets for Yandex services, and quick access to tools such as the Translator, the Alice AI assistant, and Yandex’s neural tools. The layout changes according to the usage patterns and can be customized with background themes and wallpapers.

Turbo Mode is used to compress web page data before it is sent to the browser so that the size of images and other elements is reduced to improve loading time for slow connections. Yandex originally developed this on Opera Software’s Turbo technology. For users in areas with unreliable connections or on metered mobile data, Turbo Mode noticeably increases the loading time of pages on heavy sites. It is activated automatically when the browser recognizes a slow connection or users can manually activate it.

DNS encrypts DNS queries between the browser and DNS resolver, preventing ISPs or third parties from intercepting the plain text domain name lookups that browsers normally send in the open. Most browsers do not encrypt DNS by default; Yandex Browser does so by default.

When the browser connects to public Wi-Fi networks or networks that use weak WEP encryption, the browser automatically encrypts traffic between the browser and the web sites (HTTP) using a proxy. This is not a full VPN — it only covers the traffic of the browser over the http protocol and only on connections the browser flags as insecure.

YANDEX PROTECT

Yandex Protect is the integrated security layer in the browser. It compares pages against Yandex’s database of known phishing web sites, malicious URLs, and fraudulent pages before they are loaded, showing a warning instead of the page if there is a match. Kaspersky Anti-Virus technology scans files that are downloaded. Kaspersky’s file scanning is local and scans downloads against known malware signatures.

Protect also monitors for password leaks by comparing entered credentials to databases of known compromised accounts. When it finds a match of the password in a database of breaches, it alerts the user.

In June of 2025, researchers at Radboud University released their findings that Yandex’s tracking scripts — embedded by Yandex on thousands of third-party websites through its analytics and advertising products — were using a technique to circumvent browser sandboxing and associate browsing activity with users’ Yandex accounts. This technique, which Yandex started using in 2017, and which researchers dubbed a “localhost attack,” enabled Yandex to correlate data gathered by its tracking pixel on websites with the user’s Yandex account on the same device. The researchers discovered Yandex tracking scripts on more than 14,000 government and health-related websites in the European Union. Privacy International said the technique was akin to the behavior of malware. These findings applied to Yandex’s tracking infrastructure in general, not just the browser, but the browser is part of the same ecosystem.

VIDEO TRANSLATION

Yandex’s most technically ambitious browser feature is its AI video translation, which dubs spoken video content into Russian in real-time. Playing a YouTube video in English, French, German or several other languages triggers an option to enable translation. Yandex’s model is able to transcribe the speech, translate it, and synthesize a voice-over that replaces the original audio — while keeping the original speaker’s voice characteristics: pitch, rhythm, tone, and detected emotional delivery. A speaker who sounds excited in English will sound excited in the Russian dub. A 2025 update extended this to live streams, dealing with the additional latency issue of translating content as it comes in, rather than from a full audio file.

The translation supports YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch, Coursera, VK, and a variety of other video sites. Subtitles in the original or target language can be used in conjunction with the voice-over. The voice-over itself does not just read translations in a generic voice — it analyzes the source speaker and tries to match gender, cadence and affect in the synthesized output.

This feature makes Yandex Browser different from all the other major browsers. Nothing like it ships natively in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari. The target audience is Russian speakers viewing English-language content, but the underlying capability is notable regardless of which way the translation runs.

TRANSLATION TOOLS (Text, Pages, Images, Documents)

Beyond video, Yandex incorporates translation for all types of content. Pages in foreign languages trigger an automatic offer to translate, which is powered by Yandex Translate. The translation occurs inline — the text of the page replaces, rather than redirecting to a translated version of the page. Images with text can be translated in place via a right click menu with the translation overlaid on the original image. Documents in DOC, DOCX, PDF, XLS, XLSX, PPT and PPTX formats can be submitted for translation directly from the browser’s Tableau page with results returned as translated documents. A chat-style Translator panel opens in a new tab for interactive translation of pasted text, uploaded files or entire URLs.

The translator’s forte is with languages where Yandex has trained heavily — Russian and other Slavic and Eastern European languages — and its performance with those language pairs is generally on par with what Google Translate offers for the same combinations.

ALICE AI

Alice was launched in October 2017 as Yandex’s voice assistant, first in the Search app, then across Yandex’s services including the browser. At launch, Yandex called it the most capable Russian language voice assistant and the first to be designed for natural conversational Russian (versus command-response patterns). The voice actress for Alice was Tatiana Shitova, who also voices Scarlett Johansson’s characters in Russian dubbing.

In the browser, Alice first managed voice search and simple commands. Over the years it grew to answer questions, summarize pages, open tabs, and interact with Yandex services. In May 2023, Yandex released YandexGPT, its large language model, and incorporated it into Alice, which upgraded the assistant from a retrieval-based system to a generative one. As of April 2024, Alice is running on YandexGPT 3. October 2024 saw the release of YandexGPT 4, which quadrupled the amount of text context the model could process and added chain-of-thought reasoning for more complex tasks.

In October 2025, Yandex rebranded the assistant as Alice AI and announced that it would expand significantly. Alice AI answers in a multimodal way: text answers, images from the web, video clips, map results from Yandex Maps can be shown in the same response. The browser’s SmartBox now brings Alice AI to the surface as a chat interface, with conversation history being maintained on the new tab page across sessions. The most significant upcoming capability is page awareness — Alice AI will read the content of the current open tab and answer questions about it, including summarizing a PDF or describing what a speaker said in a video. This feature is in development at the end of 2025.

In August 2025, Yandex opened alpha testing for Alice AI as a browser agent — a mode in which the assistant acts on the user’s behalf across the web. In agent mode, Alice AI can search online stores to find products in a certain budget, read and summarize articles, search for emails, and add movies to watchlists on Kinopoisk. Alpha testers were given up to 10 tasks a day. Full rollout was not announced as of this writing.

SYNC AND YANDEX ECOSYSTEM INTEGRATION

Signing into Yandex Browser using a Yandex ID account synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, form information, opened tabs, tab groups and browsing history on all devices running the browser. The sync mechanism is the same as what Chrome provides via a Google account, except that the data goes to Yandex’s servers instead of Google’s.

The sidebar and Tableau provide integration with direct access to Yandex Mail, Yandex Music, Yandex Maps, and Yandex Market (Yandex’s e-commerce platform). Users who already use those services find them a tab-click away without having to navigate there. For users who don’t use those services, these integrations are ambient features that stay out of the way.

Extensions work through the Chrome Web Store and Yandex’s own catalog of extensions. Because the browser is based on Chromium, any Chrome extension that does not specifically need Google services works in Yandex Browser without modification.

PRIVACY AND Geo-political Context

Yandex Browser gathers data about usage, browsing habits and search queries via Yandex’s telemetry and analytics systems. Yandex has a privacy policy that says it uses this data for service improvement and targeted advertising. Users can restrict certain collection using the browser’s privacy settings and Stealth Mode, which prevents third-party trackers and analytics scripts.

The more important privacy issue is geopolitical. Yandex operates under Russian law, which grants the FSB (Federal Security Service) the right to ask for user data. In 2023, a Moscow court fined Yandex for refusing to share user information with the FSB — one instance where the company pushed back — but the legal framework in which it operates gives Russian authorities considerable power to compel compliance. After the restructuring of 2024, Russian operations are entirely owned by domestic investors with no remaining Dutch holding structure to insulate it from Russian government pressure. In 2019, Yandex already granted a “golden share” to a Kremlin-linked foundation, which gave that entity veto power over important company decisions.

Security researchers have also raised concerns about Yandex’s tracking infrastructure more broadly, separate from the browser itself — the June 2025 Radboud University findings being the most recent and detailed public documentation. None of these concerns involve malicious software in the browser, or a demonstrated ability to spy on users in other countries. The concern is structural: a browser created by a company under the legal jurisdiction of Russia, gathering information about the browsing behavior of its users, in an environment where such a legal jurisdiction permits access to that data by the state, upon request.

For users in Russia and former Soviet states who use mostly Yandex’s own services, these considerations may not alter the calculation — the alternative, Chrome, sends data to Google. For users outside that region considering the browser for its translation or AI features, these are meaningful factors that users in other regions weigh differently depending on their own threat model.