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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

#51

Firefox is not really a good company anymore, they care more about politics than doing something awesome. Cf. the firing of their CEO.

Anyone who is unhappy with that decision might consider using Eich's browser, Brave.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

https://brave.com/

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

#52

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…

I work on Firefox compatability for a major website, and while obviously I agree that we need to stop building websites that only work in Chrome, it isn't always as easy as you suggest.

A large web app is almost guaranteed to run into one of Firefox's many long-open bugs. But the biggest reason in my experience is performance. Gecko's rendering engine is poorly-optimized, to the point where I regularly see a DOM modification take 10ms in Chrome (easily within a single frame) and 1000ms in Firefox (locks the UI and causes the page to flash white).

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

#53
post #24

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).

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…

I think there also needs to be a highlighted difference between an open source product, and an open source repository which is NOT the product which is distributed.

Chromium is open source, but the supported product where the developer cares about the quality of the experience is Chrome. Android is much the same, where the platform almost all apps and services target requires Google Play.

I can't expect Google to properly address my needs in either of these open source offerings, because the actual users are almost exclusively using the proprietary version.

When Google looks at what the browser needs to do, it can either make the solution proprietary or open source, and then just tell the open source users that it's unavailable unless they switch to Chrome. (See things like browser syncing, or Google Cast support.) But when Firefox implements such features, they have to do so in an open way, which is why you can run your own Firefox Sync Server.

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

#56

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).

Last time I tried using Firefox i didn't liked it.

But last week I completely moved from Chromium to Firefox.

I didn't miss Chromium.

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

#57

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.

I didn't think the project needed one. After all, I explicitely stated the distribution and version that the binaries are for. If you're looking for a statically-linked Linux binary, that will come in the future: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/41

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

#58
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...

Yes, it is a lazy way of stopping requests. I also modified Iridium's "trk" scheme code to pick up domains ending in qjz9zk so I can notify the user.

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

#59

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.

Yes, I've realized this and made an issue for this: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/38

If you have the computing resources, you can easily take out the patch that does the "wishlist" changes you don't want.

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

#60
You want enhanced privacy, control and transparency?

Use a less complex program to retrieve web pages, with less features. (Or to post data.)

Then use another program that cannot commmunicate with the network to view them. Remove all networking code and recompile.

The complexity and feature set of the second program is up to the user.

I find that many of the features of Chrome, Firefox, etc. are ones I do not need on a daily basis.

As radical as this might sound in contrast to the conventional wisdom, if I had the influence of an organization such the ones producing Chrome or Firefox I'm quite sure that I could convince other users that they really don't need these features either. Such features usually come with an undisclosed or downplayed cost.

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