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UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

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11–20 of 441 posts

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#11

While I applaud the effort that's gone into this, I urge people to consider (and use and contribute to!) Firefox. It's one of the last truly open-source browsers - both in terms of source code visibility (which Chrome(ium) has), and in terms of being able to contribute (which Chrome(ium) has not).

While I agree that people should pay more attention to Firefox, it is possible for anyone to contribute to Chromium, and many people do.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#13

On Linux Mint I get Error:Dependency is not satisfiable:libavcodec-ffmpeg56(>=7.2.4)|libavcodec-ffmped-extra56(>=7:2.4) Suggestion - The repo does not provide install instructions. For a highly not tech privacy enthusiast, I find it difficult to install for linux.

Never try to install a package intended for Debian or Ubuntu on another distribution that just happens to use .deb files, unless you have experience dealing with package dependency issues and similar problems. Either use a package intended for the distribution, or use a binary, or build from source. That looks like a version of libavcodec specific to one version of Ubuntu; that package will never work on Debian, anot…

Can't wait for Flatpak or Snappy to make end-user binary distribution a breeze

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#14
Is this browser expecting me to use TOR? Welcome and extensions pages on new tab pages wants me to go to http://www.9oo91e.qjz9zk/ domain.

I'm not finding anything about that in repo readme page. This looks odd and suspicious. Because it's even blocks requests there -> http://imgur.com/a/UnMu8

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any opinions on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Moon_%28web_browser%29 ?

No good reason to run that instead of Firefox. It looks like their main motivation to fork was to preserve XUL and XPCOM, but since Firefox doesn't plan to keep those, almost no addons will continue using them; every maintained addon will update to work with current Firefox. And using an unmaintained addon is dangerous .

>every maintained addon will update to work with current Firefox

Those that can be will be, but I imagine entire categories, scores and scores of addons will be abandoned. So much of what people expect from Firefox addons is going away with no replacement in favor of basically light javascript web apps.

Which is the point of the switch: dramatically reduce addon functionality in the interest of safety / security.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#16
post #14

Is this browser expecting me to use TOR? Welcome and extensions pages on new tab pages wants me to go to http://www.9oo91e.qjz9zk/ domain. I'm not finding anything about that in repo readme page. This looks odd and suspicious. Because it's even blocks requests there -> http://imgur.com/a/UnMu8

That isn't a tor URL. I assume it's simply a lazy way of stopping requests to google services by replacing the domains with invalid ones.

Edit: see https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/8dd86477d...

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#17
> Replace many web domains in the source code with non-existent alternatives ending in qjz9zk (known as domain substitution)

How does this play with the HSTS preload list? That'd be quite the baby to throw out with the bathwater.

edit: well, I don't see anything like "transport_security_state_static.json" in this list here, so maybe it's fine: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/re...

edit2: The preload list seems to be excluded from domain substitution explicitly. Yay! https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/4bbfff447...

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#18
post #9

Great start. Although I think we need to reverse the trend of Chrome becoming the single browser web developers use. The amount of sites that unnecessarily[0] work only in Chrome is growing daily. And that's not even counting browser extensions. I think this, more than anything else, will determine if Chrome becomes the "Internet Explorer"[1] of this decade or not. Skipping testing in IE is one thing. Skipping testin…

The thing about "Internet Explorer", is that using IE Edge, I often run into websites that demand I "Upgrade" to Chrome and won't let me use them. Fudging the user agent however, allows that website to work perfectly fine. Not testing in IE is one thing. Presenting an nonintrusive message warning you don't test in IE is another. Paying money to advertise your website, then, when I click your link, greeting me with a…

So much this. While on Firefox, Google only pulls that on you once, they constantly reoffer it to Edge users on a nearly weekly basis. And recently, they actually made the bar bigger and more obtrusive.

I filed an issue on the Chromium bug tracker, they assigned someone to look into it, and of course, nothing has been said since.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#19

Great start. Although I think we need to reverse the trend of Chrome becoming the single browser web developers use. The amount of sites that unnecessarily[0] work only in Chrome is growing daily. And that's not even counting browser extensions. I think this, more than anything else, will determine if Chrome becomes the "Internet Explorer"[1] of this decade or not. Skipping testing in IE is one thing. Skipping testin…

Slightly tangential, but on the topic of browser extensions: the Chrome extension API served as the basis for Mozilla's somewhat recent Web Extension API [0]. Many, if not most, Chrome extensions can run in Firefox out of the box right now (there's even a Firefox extension that lets you install these from the Chrome Store [1]). This has been an incredible development for anybody doing cross browser extension development (which has otherwise been a fair bit more complicated than simply including "CSS prefixes besides -webkit").

Having different browsers compete on things like this and then having the better technology become standardized and implemented in multiple browsers seems like a fairly positive outcome.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#20

While I applaud the effort that's gone into this, I urge people to consider (and use and contribute to!) Firefox. It's one of the last truly open-source browsers - both in terms of source code visibility (which Chrome(ium) has), and in terms of being able to contribute (which Chrome(ium) has not).

I would love to. But as a recent and former Firefox user, the performance just wasn't there. Both Edge and Chrome are significantly faster. I'm hoping electrolysis helps greatly in this regard. I'll be happy to switch back.
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