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UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

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

#41

Post by sunnyps »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #36
sunnyps wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! This is one of the reasons* Chrome ships with its own copy of ffmpeg which this fork decided was a bad thing. * the other being security updates for ffmpeg

It's a bad thing for Linux platforms, which should use the system version of ffmpeg; however, that's something much easier to solve when you're actually the Linux distribution, rather than a third party. Note that many of the changes in this fork come from the Debian packaging of Chromium.

IMO Google is in a better position to deal with ffmpeg security updates than Debian is. Google is spending a lot of effort into fuzz testing ffmpeg[1] and other components of Chrome and also rolls out updates very quickly.

I'd expect the distro ffmpeg to not need as much updating if you're only using it for local media that you trust. But Chrome's ffmpeg has to decode media from untrusted sources so it's important that security bugs get fixed ASAP.

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2014/01/ffmpeg-and-thousand-...

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

#42

Post by tomjakubowski »

hgf888 wrote: post #35
sunnyps wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that it's not easy to contribute to Chromium? Also the "last truly open-source" browser is hyperbolic given that Chromium is both open-source and is also developed in the open[1][2][3]. If anything over the past few years it has become more open-source as many components have been upstreamed (e.g. pdfium, android/ios stuff, etc.) [1] Chromium bug tracker: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/lis…

It doesn't matter if it's open source - it's an issue of trust. Firefox has never secretly downloaded binary blobs in the background which listen to my microphone without my permission or knowledge.[1] Chromium lost all my trust that day, even if none of my private conversations/data made it to Google that particular time. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922

It certainly matters with respect to the point that the top level commenter was making.

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

#43

Post by chocolateboy »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #32
superkuh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for Mozilla's policy of trying to making Firefox race Chrome to be the best browser for the lowest common denominator. You can't even edit your addons in Firefox anymore. They have to be signed by Mozilla. > And using an unmaintained addon is dangerous. And this is the kind of thinking I'm talking about. Firefore/Chrome/etc are all about protecting tech ignorants from themselves rather than allowing adept user…

> And this is the kind of thinking I'm talking about. The kind of thinking that says "security-sensitive software with no active maintenance and regular updates is a security hole waiting to happen"? Letting users install and run unmaintained software is dangerous. They'll get exploited. (And they'll blame the browser for that, and rightfully so.) You can still do what you want; it's entirely possible to install loca…

> it's entirely possible to install local untrusted addons. You just have to poke some settings that are intentionally hidden from most end users

It's possible to install unsigned addons in ESR, developer and unbranded builds of Firefox. It's no longer possible to install them in the regular release or beta versions. The hidden setting was disabled in Firefox 48.

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

#44

Post by FT_intern »

technion wrote: post #9
nathancahill wrote: post #5

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…

To be fair, that notification is for the benefit of the everyone. Users are too lazy/ignorant to switch browsers. The notification pushes them over the edge and prompts them to switch. They get a more secure and overall better browser.

On the other side, developers can spend more time developing features instead of fixing IE compatibility bugs.

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

#47

Post by ocdtrekkie »

sunnyps wrote: post #30
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because it's not a Chromium bug. You should file feedback with the product you're using, most (all?) Google products have a way of doing this.

I am pretty sure the only way to send feedback to the Chrome team, other than the Chromium bug tracker (which is pretty much the same people), is to send feedback from within Chrome.

Obviously, I don't have Chrome, since my issue is them pestering me to install Chrome. Which I'm not going to do.

On the other hand, if Google wants to prevent their reputation from sinking to the level of "install the Ask Toolbar", one of the Googlers on the Chromium bug tracker will see that it is dealt with.

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

#48

Post by yuhong »

technion wrote: post #9
nathancahill wrote: post #5

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…

I once had to fix TogetherJS where the proceed button was broken:

https://github.com/mozilla/togetherjs/commit/ced91da4bb53bea...

Clue: what is the problem with this code?

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

#49

Post by floatingatoll »

It's unfortunate that valuable and useful privacy enhancements were combined with "wishlist"-level changes like "disable the tab close event in Javascript".

While many may not like the uses of that event, it taints what otherwise could have been a "purely about privacy" fork of Chromium with non-privacy opinions.

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

#50

Post by mortehu »

hgf888 wrote: post #35
sunnyps wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that it's not easy to contribute to Chromium? Also the "last truly open-source" browser is hyperbolic given that Chromium is both open-source and is also developed in the open[1][2][3]. If anything over the past few years it has become more open-source as many components have been upstreamed (e.g. pdfium, android/ios stuff, etc.) [1] Chromium bug tracker: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/lis…

It doesn't matter if it's open source - it's an issue of trust. Firefox has never secretly downloaded binary blobs in the background which listen to my microphone without my permission or knowledge.[1] Chromium lost all my trust that day, even if none of my private conversations/data made it to Google that particular time. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922

The fact that it had the ability to listen to audio shouldn't be the issue, since it wouldn't do that unless you explicitly enabled it. Your grammar is kind of ambiguous there. Certainly it was downloaded without permission, but it wasn't listening without permission.

Any web page can listen to your microphone if you allow it to, and the code for it can be downloaded without your consent, even if you have JavaScript disabled, if it's embedded in the HTML code.

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