Bangladesh has a national browser. Tarjani — the word means the index finger — was launched on Tuesday, 7 March, at the Bangladesh Computer Council auditorium in Agargaon by the state minister for ICT, Zunaid Ahmed Palak, who chose the date for its place in the country’s history and framed the app as a step towards self-reliance. “To get the benefits of Smart Bangladesh we cannot depend only on foreign services,” he said. “We want to build a Smart Bangladesh ecosystem that is self-reliant. In future we will launch our own operating system too.”
What it is
A free browser for Android and iOS, downloadable from the Play Store and App Store, built under the BCC’s “secure e-mail and digital literacy centre for the government” project by the local firm Live Technologies. Its interface is in Bangla by default, with English available, and the ministry says its Bangla rendering and optimisation are stronger than other browsers’. The feature list is the standard one: a search bar, tabs, dark mode, bookmarks, an ad blocker, incognito mode and privacy controls. A desktop version is promised. Under the hood it is, like almost every mobile browser other than Safari and Firefox, a shell around the open-source Chromium engine — the same one in Chrome, Edge, Brave and Opera — with the interface, search default and blocking rules being what the developer actually built.
Why governments build browsers
Several have. Russia’s Yandex Browser and Sputnik, China’s 360 and UC Browser, India’s Epic and, briefly, a national browser project in Iran all started from the same argument: a browser is the front door to the internet, the default search engine inside it earns the money, and the data it collects about what citizens read should not leave the country. That argument has a public-interest version — better support for the local language, a search default that is not Google — and a surveillance version, and the difference lies in what the browser sends home.
The questions to ask
- What does it transmit? Any browser can send browsing history, search queries and device identifiers to its maker. Tarjani’s privacy policy on the app stores is the document to read; independent testers can check network traffic in an afternoon.
- How fast are security updates? Chromium fixes serious bugs roughly weekly. A browser whose developer ships updates months late is unsafe regardless of its features.
- What is the default search, and can you change it?
- Who owns the code? A project funded by public money and described as national could reasonably be open source, which would settle the first question for good.
None of these is a reason not to try it; Bangla-first rendering is a genuine gap that Chrome has never filled well. They are the reasons to try it with the same caution as any other app that sees everything you read.
What any browser can see
The question to hold onto is not who made it but what the software is capable of observing, because the answer is the same for every browser: every address you visit, everything you type into a page including passwords before they are encrypted, and every file you download.
Almost all new browsers, including this one, are built on Chromium, the open-source engine behind Chrome. That is sensible engineering — nobody should write a rendering engine from scratch — and it means the security of the underlying engine is as good as Chrome’s, provided the maker keeps pulling in upstream updates. Falling behind on those updates is the risk that matters, and it is invisible to users.
So the useful questions are the dull ones: how often is it updated, what is its privacy policy, and does anything leave the device that would not leave Chrome.
