What is Reddit's opinion of
Ungoogled Chromium?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
Chrome is known for having lots of built-in spying. IMO, people should be switching over to Firefox, because it is currently superior to Chrome in most ways.
But if for some reason you really love Chrome's UI or ecosystem, at least switch to Chromium, or even better, Ungoogled-Chromium
I have been Chromium alongside Firefox for when I have to use Google Hangouts or some site that only runs on Chrome, and this is not true. Over the past few years, Chromium has been integrated into the Google ecosystem as well. For those interested, there is an alternative build without all the google stuff baked in: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Well, this announcement is fairly recent and the change hasn't been implemented yet, so I wouldn't expect to see forks or plans yet. But there is precedent of forks in response to malfeatures in Chromium—for example, ungoogled-chromium.
It's open source, yeah. It does still have code that pings to Google servers within it though.
There is a project to remove all of the home calling Google code if it's something you're worried about, I personally use Firefox.
- Chromium connects to Google every now and then. Check your logs.
- There's quite a few issues around it that Tor has compiled. Not all limited to using it with Tor - https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ImportantGoogleChromeBugs
- There are issues regarding WebRTC leaking.
Regarding the first one, that's why there are builds like Ungoogled Chromium - https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Privacy is not just sending telemetry.
> At least Chromium is fully open source.
It is still integrated with Google way too strongly. If you want to be safe with this one, better use Ungoogled Chromium - https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
There are a lot of Google-specific parts in Chromium, Chrome just adds further branding, proprietary codecs, auto-update and the Software Reporter Tool.
There are projects such as Ungoogled Chromium that aim to take Chromium and strip away everything Google from it.
Potential ways to thwart Google Analytics in Chromium, if you’re looking to do so:
1) If you still need to use pure Chromium (with all Google phone-home functions intact, perhaps you could install PiHole on an RPi to block Google Analytics and other Chromium-specific traffic?
2) If you don’t need an unadulterated Chromium, there’s a fork called Ungoogled Chromium that removes such traffic from Chromium. Maybe run this fork alongside pure Chromium for a few days and see if there’s a notable difference? And if not, you can replace Chromium with this fork!
For Chromium, you want the ungoogled version: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Not sure about brave.
~~For Firefox you want to disable the safer browsing settings in about:config~~
edit: See follow up comments RE:Firefox
IF YOU DO NOT LIKE GOOGLE, HERE'S WHAT YOU CAN DO:
1 Use a non-google browser without telemetery. Firefox is alright, although I reccommend you use a firefox derivative, or other secure browser.
Ungoogled-chromium - https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Palemoon
GNU Icecat
Waterfox
2 Use a non-google search engine. I reccomend duckduckgo.com, which I use and it is very good. Others are startpage and qwant.
3 Don't use google hardware. Avoid google chromebooks and google phones.
4 Try and find alternatives to other google services, such as vid.me for youtube and Solus linux instead of Chrome OS.
5 Get a good adblocker and / or tracker blocker. I use ublock origin, I find it good.
More info: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Note that I've not overridden the build script's tarball functionality (yet) because the maintainer of ungoogled-chromium is rewriting his build system and told me to just hold off until he's gotten done doing that.
Otherwise, it's a great browser to have (for me) for instances where a site doesn't render properly in Pale Moon.
>There's basically no reason to use Chromium.
Unless you care about the glorious 10% performance bonus from using "-O2 -march=native" and compiling with the LLVM toolchain. Or if you use musl libc and Google's glibc dynamic linked binary doesn't work.
>degoogled-chromium
It's ungoogled-chromium :3
Chromium still contains some questionable things in terms of privacy: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Also, I'd rather not have a Chrome/Chromium browser monopoly.
And I also just don't think that it's a particularly good browser. It's not customizable at all and it wastes tons of RAM as well as battery life and has many gaping design flaws, like for example its completely broken permission system for extensions, resulting in the Chrome App Store being filled to the brim with malware, or the auto-fill filling out even hidden input fields, making it trivial to phish Chromium user's data.
If that's you're reasoning, you probably shouldn't use Google Chrome either...
If you don't wanna jump ship for Firefox, there's a chrome-based alternative called Ungoogled Chromium, which is standard chromium but without the data tracking.
I tried to find everything each browser collects from you that requires opt-out. I skipped anything that required an opt-in. Hopefully accurate, this is my research after 20 minutes.
Chrome collects:
- anything you type into address bar
- bookmarks (only if signed in, cannot opt-out without signing in)
- what page you're on if you hit a 404 (EDIT: and the site doesn't handle the 404 error)
- usage telemetry (number of tabs, the browser version, how often it's used)
- Chrome "Safe Browsing" would previously (before 2016) broadcast every URL you visit unencrypted, and may still do so if it does not use the latest API.
- Chrome permanently embeds a unique code in each installation and a unique string that indicates where it was downloaded from, unless you download it from google.com/chrome
- Chrome tests for IPv4 and IPv6 support by pinging their own servers (which reveals your IP and can fingerprint you via capabilities). Cannot be opted-out.
Firefox collects:
- usage telemetry (how many tabs are open, how much memory Firefox is using)
- your country based on IP (to set an initial default search engine and display news/data)
> There is SRWare Iron if you are concerned with privacy.
It's been known for years that SRWare Iron is a scam. It is also not really open source. If you want Chrome without Google, you better use Ungoogled Chromium.
> It's hard to deny that the recent Firefox is less user-friendly.
It is imo just as hard to claim that it is. Do you have anything to support that?
Honestly, quite surprised to see Brave at the top. The way they have been so aggressively and (in my opinion) underhandedly advertising themselves I assumed they were lying, but I guess they're actually good about privacy.
One thing I wish they had done was toss some specifically privacy focused browsers in the mix. Something like ungoogled-chromium for example.
Options are always a good thing, as long as they are FOSS ofc.
Even tho Epiphany seems to perform well, nothing really stops the devs from installing one more browser (just install, don't put it on the dock).
I'd love to see unGoogled-chromium or IceCat or vanilla firefox as the optional browser.
That's not to mention all roads now lead to Google Chrome.
Brave: Google Chrome Opera: Google Chrome Microsoft Edge: Google Chrome Firefox: Seriously considering embedded Chrome Qupzilla: Google Chrome (via QTWebEngine)
No one cares about ungoogled-chromium, so Google's ever expansive tracking carries on.
Slapping a new GUI ontop of Chrome and calling it a 'new browser' is pathetic, and something that everyone is doing.
Very few people are thinking outside the box.
Gngr, Dillo, and NetSurf are the only functional browsers that are actually independent of Google's every growing tenticals. (for now).
Since Edge is only Chromium-based and Chromium open-source, Edge Insiders does not have any of the features provided by Google such as Google Translator or Google Drive integration which can be handy, but come at the cost of privacy. Chromium doesn't secretly send your stuff to Google. (Since it is open-source, we can check.)
​
There are many privacy-focussed Chromium-based browsers, and even projected dedicated to removing every mention of Google in its source code (eg. Ungoogled Chromium). And in fact, Electron and Chromium Embedded Framework, which are used for numerous Desktop apps including Skype, Adobe Acrobat, Steam, Evernote, BitDefender, Slack, Discord, VSCode, and many more, all base on Chromium. Nevertheless, none of these send any of their data to Google (unless of course the developer decided to use Google Analytics).
“Vivaldi” ≠ “All Chromium based browsers”.
We all know chromium's not perfect when it comes to user respect, but a team is working hard to strip away all the privacy-threatening crap; their project's called ungoogled-chromium.
It's gotten so bad, we need to do what https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium did for Chromium for the Firefox code base.
About the only safe Firefox derivate is probably the Tor Browser now.
If you want Chromium fork, which is much more privacy oriented. You may try several of those alternatives. Ungoogled Chromium (basically Chromium without all privacy challenging bullshit), Iridium (basically the same and more security related futures) and Brave (masquerades as Chrome, so good for fingerprinting, blocks ads and tracking as well)
There's at least no blatant tracking in Chromium, that can't be turned off. There are some (imo) justified things, but if you want to get rid of them as well and go ultra tinfoil, you can check out this project https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
I would recommend ungoogled chromium over brave (https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium). Brave are shady and the 'shields' don't actually do anything. Pale moon is probably the best firefox alternative
Why not just use ungoogled chromium then?
Also, there are some addons on AMO that claim to always redirect Firefox Android to desktop mode. I don't know how well they work but it's probably worth a shot.
Right. About that. Chromium is the antithesis to that. It's also mostly open-source, but it being transparent about being evil hasn't really stopped people from trusting it. (Here is for example a project that tries to patch that out.)
But yeah, there is still a major difference between Firefox and Chromium: - Firefox is actually well-documented, it's not just a source code dump. - Firefox's source code is looked at by the Tor Browser devs which will get deep in there. - Mozilla does actually promise privacy and has a reputation for it, so if Mozilla were to violate that, that's a story that journalists will hunt after. - Mozilla is a nonprofit with privacy among their legally-binding mission goals. They can and sometimes have to weigh that up with their other goals, e.g. they want to incentivize the creation of webpages, so they have to give webpage owners a way to monetize that, which generally is going to involve tracking users, but if you feel like they don't have a good reason to not do their best for privacy, you can actually sue them.
Opera ist nicht nur ein Skin, die haben genug umgebaut ums zu umschiffen. Genau wie Brave und was ungoogled tut ist folgendes: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Die Möglichkeit besteht, doch ich bin sehr zuversichtlich, dass es da von der Konkurrenz einen Workaround geben wird. Wenn nicht, dann eben wieder FF.
> Isn’t Chromium open sourced
Yes
> Isn’t it all the shit Chrome adds that’s bad for privacy
This is a CHROMIUM proposal. Plus, Chromium still phones home to google. Else ungoogled-chromium wouldn't exist.
> Brave has plans to move on from chromium BTW in the near future.
That's nice. I'll still prefer Firefox.
Coincidentally, I actually made a post on Vivaldi a while back: here, tbf every browser has its controversies, some more than others, if you want a chromium based browser then ungoogled chromium is probably the best but other than being clean from telemetry, it doesn’t improve privacy unless you harden via extensions. In which case privacytools.io has some good recommendations for.
Umm... use Firefox? Or Brave? Or Vivaldi? Anyhow I think you're looking for this project: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
You probably need to compile it as it seems it's released for Debian.
Check out the ungoogled-chromium project. It's Chromium with all of Google's phone home features removed. The disadvantage is that it can lag behind the latest version. It's still on 55 I think.
- I'm not sure, even if it is, it will be less effective.
- I use ungoogled-chromium, binary can be taken here, source code of any version can be taken from github.
- If we talk about full functionality of uMatrix in the new versions of chromium with Manifest V3, it will be impossible, to make uMatrix work we will have to return webRequest API instead of new and make everything work, I do not know how it will be possible, even if it works at first, over time it will be more and more difficult, as google will bind everything to the new declarative api.
What about Ungoogled Chromium ? It's basically a de-googled Chrome browser.
If you want a browser like Firefox,there is also LibreWolf
How is a de-googled chromium browser "google backed"?
At least for safety,the GrapheneOS devs themselves stated that Chromium-based browsers are much better than the alternatives.
For privacy,well,Ungoogled Chromium isn't compiled with the Google web services package
> explain how does chromium work privacywise?
Poorly without extensive patching, and even then there's always a risk of privacy invasion due to patches being out of date.
That's just wrong. Every time I fire up vanilla Chromium, even with everything turned off, a bunch of 1e100.net analytic domains connect, even without going to a single webpage. Google is tracking you, 100%. Google has also been caught injecting binaries into Chromium code. The developer of UG Chromium specifically says they:
>Disable functionality specific to Google domains (e.g. Google Host Detector, Google URL Tracker, Google Cloud Messaging, Google Hotwording, etc.)
>Strip binaries from the source code (known as binary pruning; see docs/design.md for details)
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#motivation-and-philosophy
Dude, you don't have to even go that far. Just examine the traffic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/34tc2f/how_safe_is_chromium_privacy_wise/cqxzhh8/
If they could be disabled you wouldn't need things like this:
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#motivation-and-philosophy
No, I wouldn't.
They are not trustworthy, as you have said.
There are better choices out there, so choices as you have said.
The biggest reason of all for me though, is privacy. At the moment, I'm using a customized Firefox Nightly that I know for a fact...
1) Does not have anything malicious in it's code.
2) Is private and secure. (Obviously everyone's definition of private and secure varies, but for my threat model it is.)
3) The company/team behind it has good intentions. (For the most part anyways.)
That being said, if I couldn't use Firefox and was forced to use a Chromium-based browser, I'd use ungoogled-chromium.
Chromium still phones home I'm pretty sure. That' why there's: ungoogled-chromium.
I still use Firefox. That was a very, very shitty thing they did though and I don't stand behind it.
I was never affected by that whole thing though. I was using GNU IceCat (GNU fork) at the time. I'm only using Firefox (ESR 5.6 I believe) because my current repo doesn't include IceCat.
IceCat is probably the best you'll get IMO.
Cela dit, je préfère de loin Firefox comme navigateur principal. J'utilise chromium pour debugger du js (firefox a encore un peu de retard sur ce point).
"A number of features or background services communicate with Google servers despite the absence of an associated Google account or compiled-in Google API keys. Furthermore, the normal build process for Chromium involves running Google's own high-level commands that invoke many scripts and utilities, some of which download and use pre-built binaries provided by Google. Even the final build output includes some pre-built binaries."
Better use Iridium then, which is Chromium with added privacy and security. While Chromium may be free software (at least for the most part), that doesn't guarantee it will respect your privacy (and it most likely won't).
Not just one programmer working on it: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
And they still can't give any sort of guarantee for it not tracking you in some way or that an update from Google with new tracking code won't slip by them.
First of all that is my repo, I created it. Like I said in my original reply I don't know who the OP is, and I had no intention of "advertising" here, the only place I posted about my build was in Here.
Second the whole source for my project you can find either in the PR's (Link) or doing a diff with the official void-packages repo (and I'll be happy to detail every change if you want ^^). Just as a quick summary sndio patch is moved a bit later in the patching stage, and one of the official patches is removed because it's the same with one from ungoogled chromium. The rest of the changes are made to the template.
As for the binaries, noone is forcing you to download them, you can always build from source. maybe /u/Duncaen can correct me on this, but I think there isn't a way to verify that the source files didn't change during build, and also dependencies affect the final build so it's not entirely deterministic.
And don't get me wrong, I'll answer questions if anyone has any, and I do share the security concerns about binaries (hence why I compile ungoogled-chromium from source and not download it from somewhere else xD). But in this case you judged even my source untrusty, even though the source is there for anyone to compare and build.
No, chromium still has Google integrations and telemetries and such, the ungoogled-chromium project specifically removed all that for more privacy
If I recall correctly, for me to build Ungoogled Chromium takes around half an hour (on a relatively recent macOS desktop). I might be misremembering though.
There's a couple of ways Google will get your data while browsing (in addition to all the data they get when you use their services, which I'm not going to mention):
- Google collects a bunch of different random pieces of data about how you use Chrome, which can include some of your browsing history. (There's a list here, although it's not particularly easy to understand)
- If you turn on sync in Chrome (which Google intentionally makes confusing and easy to do by accident), your full browsing history gets sent to Google.
- If you use Google search, the terms you search for, and the results you click on the search results page, are sent to Google.
- Any page that includes Google ads sends data back to Google that alllows them to know you visited that page.
By using Firefox, you avoid #1 and #2, but the combination of #3 and #4 still allows Google to get most of your browsing history.
Installing an ad-blocker such as uBlock Origin will effectively stop #4. This alone is a pretty big benefit - in most cases, only a fraction of your browsing history is pages you directly click on from search results, and those will effectively be the only pages that Google can track.
For search results, your only real option is to switch to another search engine. If you don't like DDG, another good option is Startpage - they have a deal with Google to use Google's search results, so you can get roughly the same results without being tracked.
Even fewer realize Brave is no different from Google Chrome.
Developers were so lazy they even stopped modifying the GUI and decided to let the flaws of Chrome roll on unpatched.
You can't. Even Chromium has them. There is a project called Ungoogled Chromium. But even it doesn't remove all privacy-intruding features. Chromium is way tightly integrated with Google.
Don't use Chrome. If you like Chrome there is Chromium, but it's still not perfect in terms of privacy. There are projects that are aiming to remove the privacy-invasive components though, like ungoogled-chromium.
Chromium still calls the PRISM partner base and thus is not safe.
Learn more here:
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
I do not advice for using Ungoogled Chromium itself either. There problems to it as well, e.g. it cannot update itself.
I guess you're talking about ungoogled-chromium, am I right?
It's a quite speedy browser, but that comes to the cost of it (by default) not having a way to install extensions, not having widevine (needed for netflix and other streaming services)
From my limited understanding, mostly yes, but not 100%
There are still some browser features in normal chromium that rely on google services (safe browsing for instance)
​
>Key Features
>
>These are the core features introduced by ungoogled-chromium.
>* Disable functionality specific to Google domains (e.g. Google Host Detector, Google URL Tracker, Google Cloud Messaging, Google Hotwording, etc.) This includes disabling Safe Browsing. Consult the FAQ for the rationale. >* Block internal requests to Google at runtime. This feature is a fail-safe measure for the above, in case Google changes or introduces new components that our patches do not disable. This feature is implemented by replacing many Google web domains in the source code with non-existent alternatives ending in qjz9zk (known as domain substitution; see docs/design.md for details), then modifying Chromium to block its own requests with such domains. >* Strip binaries from the source code (known as binary pruning; see docs/design.md for details)
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#key-features
As to how to get it, I believe it is available as either a Snap or Flatpak, and on Ubuntu Snap would be the easiest option.
There's also <strong>Ungoogled Chromium</strong> (*adds back the Google search* ~~\s~~) which on Android it has a version that supports web extensions, another one as system webview and a regular one without extensions. Has cross platform desktop packages too. It also has useful bits of Bromite, Brave and alike (btw if you aren't an illiterate clown don't use Brave xd).
Nuh huh, this is a fork of chromium with all the google parts ripped out. There's no sync, and all the links to Google's support redirect to a dummy url: https://support.9oo91e.qjz9zk/chrome?p=syncgoogleservices. It's very secure (even more so than firefox). You can build it from source if you want it.
It's funny because the chrome store doesn't even recognize it as chrome anymore (there's an extension that adds support for it though). And you'll need to manually update / add Widevine.
Here's the code on github if you wanna take a look at it. Here's their website
> It used to have like only one developer, but now, it has like 68+ developers and growing.
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/graphs/contributors
One person who does almost all the work. Two other regular contributors who do a small portion of the work. Dozens more people who have done one-time (or handful-of-times) contributions.
Yes. There's still a lot of Google blobs, antipatterns, and tracking code to remove.
If you'd like, you can browse through the patches here.
It's open source like Android is open source. The code is visible but Google controls it and will change it in whatever way it considers best and then use its power to justify the change. This is why Ungoogled Chromium exists now.
Ungoogled-chromium is chromium but without google, so no spell check, no sync, no safe browsing, nothing you sending back to google or getting from google, no extesnion support either, for extenstions you would need to sideload an external extension that will allow you to install extensions for the chrome web store. Here's the official binaries site.
If you're however looking for ways to minimize the data getting sent to google you can read about the project and see what you can disable yourself.
The difference is that EdgeHTML wasn't open source. Chromium is. You can download and build chromium from source, and because people can see the code, there's scrutiny over how much Googleness is in it. A case in point is Ungoogled Chromium, which takes the chromium source code compiled into a binary with no googleness whatsoever. You might think, why can't people just use Firefox. But actually if you want guaranteed web compatibility, chromium is the only solution. This is why open source drivers for the web are so important
I don't use Gentoo nor compile firefox from source, but I do use ungoogled-chromium and I have to compile it from source everytime there's an update. It's basically chrome without the google telemetry stuff and optimized for privacy
It takes my poor i3 9100F(4 cores/4 threads) about 7 to 9 hours to compile. If I'm using the pc while compiling, it can take up to 12 hours. Sometimes I wish I had bought a better CPU lol
Depends on what you're trying to protect, from whom you're trying to protect it, and how far you're willing to go. As a baseline, I'd recommend installing uBlock Origin and enabling all of Fanboy's filterlists in the menu as well as installing Decentraleyes and Smart HTTPS in Firefox. I wouldn't recommend any browser that isn't 100% open source (Firefox is, if you like Chrome you might consider Ungoogled Chromium).
If you want more fine-grained control than uBlock Origin, I recommend also adding uMatrix and Skip Redirect. I personally have uMatrix set to block all third-party assets, all cookies, and all Javascript by default, but this requires manually unbreaking websites by whitelisting domains. However, it prevents most varieties of cross-site tracking, among being a "quieter" browsing experience (web pages are reduced to formatted text and images). Skip Redirect turns redirect links (such as those used for tracking on this website via out.reddit.com) into direct links to avoid tracking, but this too breaks some websites that rely on redirects for proper functionality.
There are changes you can make beyond these, but this should at least stop most advertiser tracking. Government tracking is more difficult and requires more sacrifice.
If you want a chromium based privacy respecting browser there is UG Chromium and Iridium. Vivaldi is closed source proprietary freeware so I would not recommend that if you are concerned about privacy.
Actually, " Without signing in to a Google Account, Chromium does pretty well in terms of security and privacy. However, Chromium still has some dependency on Google web services and binaries. ..."
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Also, Android is a look-but-don't-touch open source, whereby Google controls who can contribute to it and when vulnerabilities get patched, so they can just retain known weaknesses that governments can exploit as a backdoor or, since they control the Android source code, disable adblockers or use poor default settings to make it easier for them and their ad partners to track the activities of those who aware they have to customize the settings.
I'm neither a Chrome nor a Brave expert, and there's certainly no way to just list these off, as we are talking about multiple million lines of code with tens of thousands of design decision, but this is probably the closest that you'll get to an answer for that question: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/716
Still, though, you should assume that really most things are not yet patched by neither Brave nor ungoogled-chromium, because that code base is so massive.
Je n’utilise que Ungoogled Chromium.
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans integration with Google. It also features some tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency (almost all of which require manual activation or enabling).
ungoogled-chromium retains the default Chromium experience as closely as possible. Unlike other Chromium forks that have their own visions of a web browser, ungoogled-chromium is essentially a drop-in replacement for Chromium.
> even Chromium is more Free than Firefox.
According to the head of the ungoogled-chromium project, this is false: the chromium build process both runs and includes a lot of mysterious binaries for Google services and tracking.
It does not seem valid to say it's more free when it takes a large team effort to hack chromium until only open source code is included in the final binary.
Https:/github.com/eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Edit: less superlatives
You could use a minimal Gentoo (chromeos upstream) install with the @FREE (or your choice) accept_license flag and ungoogled-chromium in the .xinitrc.
Note that Chromium has other problems though.
Certainly one big advantage is that it comes pre-installed in every Linux distro. No need to go out of your way to install Chrome :)
If you ask me, I consider Firefox and Chrome to be comparable featurewise but I prefer to avoid Chrome because when I use it I get the impression that it has Google's tendrils all over the place. Even Chromium is not free of googly bits, which is why projects such as Ungoogled Chromium exist.
I think ungoogled-chromium can cover it way better than I can. Read around the readme and wiki pages and you'll get a fairly good picture of what Chrome does. There's a reason the Tor project isn't based on Chromium :p
I'm also starting to hate Google as a company (will never forgive the death of Project Ara), but Chrome as a browser isn't half bad. If you don't like Google, I'd suggest ungoogled-chromium, proving once again the greatness of free software.
Google Chrome is definitely still worse than Chromium, but yeah, Chromium isn't either terribly great for privacy.
As the other guy already said, ungoogled-chromium is a thing. The page also explains to some degree what changes it makes, so that's a relatively good indicator of questionable things in Chromium.
I would personally still recommend Firefox, though. It's been built from the ground up by a non-profit organization and the community, rather than by an advertising company and then afterwards patched to be less privacy-invasive.
The web is already quite a pile of trash and it's only going to get worse with HTML standards committees including support for "technologies" like DRM. Everything is shit.
Google abuses Chrome for data collection and surveillance. Now, perhaps you're technically-savvy and figure you use Chromium instead, but that is still somewhat heavily-integrated with Google (fetches pre-built binares during building process and other things). Perhaps you find this project which aims to unfuck that - is it worth the effort?
Mozilla seems keen on fucking with its users by killing extension support and moving its browser in the direction of Chrome, among other things. Oh, you're a user of Pentadactyl or Vimperator? Good luck with that.
That strips your choice of web browsers which A: respect your freedoms and B: whose developers respect their users and A down quite substantially. Pale Moon is probably the sanest choice left.
Next to Pale Moon, even if it's a Chromium fork, I like Vivaldi a lot, since that browser has an actual, configurable interface with a good feature set, unlike Chromium. Their devs also don't seem to assume that their user base consists of lobotomized monkeys.
Edit: Fixed wrong first link.
>Update as of September 2016: I, Eloston, am in a period of time where I do not have as much time as I had before to work on this project...
(source)
>Update 9/29: Our favorite infosec expert (whom we’ve cited before on a few matters) SwiftOnSecurity, let us know today that Ungoogled Chromium is a student project and doesn’t have the ability to update itself (and likely hasn’t been updated.) In that regard, we can’t recommend it...
(source: lifehacker)
Uma versão melhor: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
ungoogled-chromium
A Google Chromium variant for removing Google integration and enhancing privacy, control, and transparency
A number of features or background services communicate with Google servers despite the absence of an associated Google account or compiled-in Google API keys. Furthermore, the normal build process for Chromium involves running Google's own high-level commands that invoke many scripts and utilities, some of which download and use pre-built binaries provided by Google. Even the final build output includes some pre-built binaries. Fortunately, the source code is available for everything.
ungoogled-chromium is a set of configuration flags, patches, and custom scripts. These components altogether strive to accomplish the following: * Disable or remove offending services and features that communicate with Google or weaken privacy * Strip binaries from the source tree, and use those provided by the system or build them from source * Add, modify, or disable features that inhibit control and transparency (these changes are minor and do not have significant impacts on the general user experience)
Firefox does by default but you can change all the telemetry through about:config, including changing url addresses
Chromium doesn’t let you do that
Ungoogled chromium really is the best option for a chromium based browser. Pretty easy to use but you will have to install extensions store. The chrome://flags are awesome and this list includes most of the ones to change. I would personally add in the “Clear data on exit” flag and some like remove “show avatar button”
https://avoidthehack.com/how-to-install-configure-ungoogled-chromium
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/docs/flags.md
It does have that option built-in, check out their flags near the bottom.
Either enable the option in chrome://flags or launch with --enable-feautres=ClearDataOnExit.
For downgrading MacOS, you can only downgraded to the version that your macbook pro comes with, so if it comes with Catalina, you won't be able to downgrade it to Mojave (at least not officially).
As far as build-in apps, older version will mean older versions, Mojave support safari up to version 14, Catalina support safari up to version 15 (which just got released).
Other apps, such as mail, photo, note, reminder etc will have some new features on more recent MacOS version, but not by much, as least I won't upgrade my OS just because of that. Check wikipedia for a list of changes/differences for each OS version.
I don't use facebook, so can't say much about it. Here is how I do web broswing:
I use vanilla safari (version 14, no addons/extensions, Mojave) + chromium with ublock origin, safari is good for battery, good integration with macos and other apple devices. While chromium handles anything google (youtube, gmail) and also website with lots ads.
If you not fan of google or chromium for any reason, try ungoogled chromium (https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium), it removed a lot of google binaries from the default chromium, so it might be a little more resource friendly.
You could use librewolf, which is pre-hardened firefox, or ungoogled chromium as a chromium alternative, but bare in mind despite being clean from telemetry it doesn’t improve privacy unless you harden it via extensions, privacytools.io has some recommendations for this
It depends on your usecase, I’d personally recommend librewolf which is more private than Firefox and also slightly more lightweight. But in terms of a chromium alternative ungoogled chromium is also good as long as you harden it with extensions, privacytools.io has a good guide for this
Which is the best engine there is? It is completely open source so anyone can modify and remove everything they don’t like, including Google. The best example here is ungoogled chromium
I didn't like how many ads Brave was shoving down my throat, so I went to UnGoogled Chromium, and I am glad I went down that route. My favorite browser before deGoogling was Edge (Chromium).
> doesn’t send anything to Google
If you actually want a browser that doesn't do that you what this fork of Chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
If you're trying to live a low google life, Firefox is much easier but I get wanting to keep the Chrome UI.
Chrome, Chromium et al set options through the chrome://settings and chrome://flags URLs.
The ones for ungoogled-chromium are documented here:
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/docs/flags.md
I'm not sure what the issues are, but that's what they claim on downloads:
> NOTE: These binaries are provided by anyone who are willing to build and submit them. Because these binaries are not necessarily reproducible, authenticity cannot be guaranteed; In other words, there is always a non-zero probability that these binaries may have been tampered with.
Also, when you look at the history of binaries of a specific popular platform, you can see many inconsistencies and skipped versions.
well I did know quite a bit going in. I knew that coding on an iPad would require jumping through some hoops, but I also know that code-server let's you use VS Code on an iPad, which is pretty good already. I knew that you could setup a VPS with CI/CD to automatically preview and test your code as well. As for web browsing, I saw that Ungoogled-Chromium did have some builds called Ungoogled-Chromium-Bionic, which I assumed were for the A12 bionic chip. However it was only later that I found out that an iPadOS app is still very much in development. I knew that my backup plan would be firefox, but I had no idea that firefox would be that buggy. Lastly, for file syncing I knew that you could connect Nextcloud to the Files app. But I'd still rather use Syncthing. One thing I didn't research beforehand was fixing metadata on my 360 videos, admittedly something I should have thought about.
Ultimately, I mainly just wanted to see what Procreate was like, as I had heard a ton about it. I wanted to see if it was worth all the compromises I was making. I thought I could make it work somehow, but it just ended up harder than I expected.
Which only leaves the <strong>Iridium Browser</strong> if you don't want to hand over your life to the bad empire and due to the lack of a ungoogled-chromium port.
It's a pity that there are no reasonable alternatives to quitebrowser which make use of QtWebEngine, but I was looking for a lightweight alternative to Firefox/Chromium for regular use (not keyboard-focused).
If you're a Google Chrome user, or just like using Chromium based browsers, then I recommend checking out ungoogled-chromium or Iridium. They're superior to Google Chrome in terms of privacy, control and transparency.
If you don't have a browser preference, then Firefox is a pretty decent option for just a default browsing experience.
ungoogled-chromium isn't going to be accepted into the official repos (for reasons detailed here) , but there is some discussion of getting it into an unofficial repo: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/375 and so that could be one place to start if you're interested
Trust none with ungoogled chromium, a fork of chromium with the google features stripped out https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium it's not my project but I saw it on yt and started using it ( its not connecting to g servers so you'll need to update it manually )
Apple's actually better with privacy (which is not to say good) than unaltered Android IMO. You're right that Chrome is absolute trash though privacy-wise, no matter how you configure it. (Need to still use Chrome but want privacy? Use "Ungoogled Chromium" instead.)
Also the risk of the Chinese government harvesting your data is not necessarily that they will directly persecute you because of it (since, again, you don't live under them, at least not yet), but rather two things:
They will use it to train AI and create technology that will be used to directly attack you, your country, the rest of the world, and their own citizens. Data is money. Using Chinese technology is donating little fractions of pennies to the world's most oppressive government every time you send a message or browse the Web, pennies that add up over millions of users and help to create internment camps, conquer Hong Kong, etc.
They could steal/use your identity/money for covert ops. They haven't been caught doing this yet I don't think, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Chrome is based on chromium, which is mostly open source from what I know (except for some binary blobs here and there).
On top of that, there is a project called ungoogled-chromium that tries to provide a chromium experience with nearly 0 google tracking features, hence providing a privacy respecting state of the art browser experience!
So, I think "The Open Source Browser Project" is still wholly true.
Go to its github page and there you will find the oficial repositories for each platform. On some you find instructions to build it, as on Debian and Ubuntu versions, on others you can simply "google" it, for example: "how to install packages from the AUR on arch".
There is a recent video by Chris Titus explaining how to build packages from source too. It may enlight you.
PS: It takes several hours to build it, in my case it took 18 hours to do it. But my PC is old.
PS.2: As far as I know, the Windows version is outdated, so you shouldn't use it. And for android it's easier to use Bromite.
This post reminded me to give ungoogled-chromium another shot. Actually making this comment from UGC right now.
I didn't realize how juttery scrolling is on all Chromium derivates (tested Chrome, Edgium, UGC, etc.), apparently. Enabled the flag for "smooth" scolling helps basically 0. That alone will probably keep me on Firefox. Didn't think something as basic as scrolling could feel so awful lol
What you are looking for is Ungoogled-Chomium, available in AUR. Just takes a little bit to get extensions going but then its gravy.
In regards to Firefox. Have you been using [containers](www.ghacks.net/2020/02/24/what-are-firefox-containers/) ?
>Privacy comes as one of the many nice side effects of owning the hardware and software heart and soul.
It has to be built with privacy in mind. Just look at Chromium, it's FOSS but it's still spyware because it calls home! So if you want a "private chromium" you have to use this https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Nothing wrong with basing yourself off an open source project such as chromium if you know what you're doing. Hence projects like ungoogled-chromium. Brave have stripped everything out and is open source, don't trust it? Check it yourself. Basing yourself off of chromium comes with many other benefits such as general website compatibility aspects that smaller-share browsers like Edge and Safari often lack.