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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

#311

Post by RandomlyGen »

striking wrote: post #40
jakebasile wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, technological process often comes from not inventing something new. I don't have strong opinions on snappy aside from the name being silly, but taking anti-NIH to the extreme is not how we advance the industry.

It's not extreme at all. All you have to do is install a distro with a good packaging system. Arch is wonderful, and I've heard good things about Void and Gentoo. Imagine a package system where you could ask to download node.js, and you'll get the latest version. And that's it. Better yet, imagine having to build a package from source and installing it. You could do it by hand, leaving orphan files all over your syst…

There's literally nothing special about arch or pacman. It's just like any other package manager with newer packages.

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

#312

Post by Ruud-v-A »

echelon wrote: post #82

Is there a decent alternative to Chrome on Android? I am absolutely, nauseatingly sick of ads on mobile. Almost every news website I visit fills the browser with full screen ads that are infuriatingly difficult to close, change the scrolling behavior and viewport in an entirely unusable way, or try to launch Google Play Store links in the background. It's so annoying, and definitely to the point of being one of my to…

Not a true answer to your question, but ... stop visiting those sites? Hopefully the site operators keep some metrics on how intrusive ads affect their bounce rate. Whenever I end up on a site that pops up a full-screen overlay, 9/10 times the link I followed did not sound interesting enough for me to tolerate the ad, and I hit the back button. There is so much more to read.

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

#313

Post by gcp »

armitron wrote: post #92
om2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is much less secure than other modern browsers. And Chrome is indeed very secure. But I think it's incorrect to say that it's "orders of magnitude" more secure than Safari. This hasn't been true since Safari introduced multiprocess and sandboxing. Safari and Edge are closer to Chrome in security level than they are to Firefox. That's why pwn2own doesn't even include Firefox in the competition any more but doe…

Agreed on Safari/Edge but note that I didn't use the words "very secure" to describe Chrome in isolation. How can something that gets publicly exploited year after year by _teenagers_ (1)(2) be called "very secure" ? The grim reality is that we never had a browser than can be called even remotely secure. Major factors for that are the implementation languages (C++ and C) and the vast attack surface. It's disheartenin…

How can something that gets publicly exploited year after year by _teenagers_ (1)(2) be called "very secure" ?

You're underestimating teenagers.

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

#314

Post by gcp »

craigsmansion wrote: post #251
NeutronBoy wrote: post #4

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).

Chromium is Free Software as well. Mozilla is not a club of like-minded hackers that try to keep the web livable anymore. They're a large company now with corporate salaries and expensive furniture and a prime real estate office that values advertisers over users. Firefox is their money maker. Chromium is a Free Software version derived from a proprietary browser. The people who made that happen must have had an idea…

There would be some truth to this if Chromium had a large non-Google developer community leading it along an independent course from Chrome.

But that is, quite frankly, not the case.

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

#315

Post by RandomlyGen »

craigsmansion wrote: post #251
NeutronBoy wrote: post #4

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).

Chromium is Free Software as well. Mozilla is not a club of like-minded hackers that try to keep the web livable anymore. They're a large company now with corporate salaries and expensive furniture and a prime real estate office that values advertisers over users. Firefox is their money maker. Chromium is a Free Software version derived from a proprietary browser. The people who made that happen must have had an idea…

> Free Software version derived from a proprietary browser

Chrome is based on Chromium, not the other way around. It's also pretty much Chrome with changed branding and no built-in Flash (thank god!)

Thinking that google leaves Chromium alone or that it's somehow independent is naive.

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

#316

Post by joshstrange »

alexbecker wrote: post #52
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…

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 modi…

I agree completely, I only use Chrome and only open FF when I'm about to push a feature or if QA kicks something back. In the same way I don't use a production size DB locally when writing new code (but need to test performance after the feature is complete) I don't use a slower browser in my day to day development because why would I? It would be like given the choice between two computers to work on choosing the slower of the two.

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

#317

Post by mrb »

stephenr wrote: post #173
mrb wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't be evil" was and still is in the Google code of conduct. Source: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

Their actions don't really follow that concept and haven't for a while

Why?

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

#318

Post by hrjet »

nikcub wrote: post #208

Removing Google's binary blobs is mitigating one issue, but replacing it with an entire binary blog from an anonymous github user might be introducing new ones. On that note - can you tell us more about the project? ie. if you plan on keeping this updated long terms (i've watched a lot of promising chromium forks fade after an initial big splash), what your plans are, if you'll you accept contributions, how the binar…

> and/or have a lighter browser (without canvas, webgl, webrtc etc.) with better defaults (ie. no hardware access, location, notifications, cookies, history, etc.) for opening links, private browsing etc

We are building one [1]. Contributions are welcome! In the meanwhile, the ungoogled-chromium project in combination with uMatrix is I think a great way to transition away from Chromium.

[1] https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr

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

#319

Post by gman99 »

echelon wrote: post #82

Is there a decent alternative to Chrome on Android? I am absolutely, nauseatingly sick of ads on mobile. Almost every news website I visit fills the browser with full screen ads that are infuriatingly difficult to close, change the scrolling behavior and viewport in an entirely unusable way, or try to launch Google Play Store links in the background. It's so annoying, and definitely to the point of being one of my to…

Netguard [1] is a loopback firewall (installs as a local VPN) that doubles as an adblocker if you install the version from github [2]. I installed from the play store and used the IAP to contribute to development before swapping to the github version (the version on the play store can't block ads [3] due to it being a ToS violation)

Note that one of the recent updates [4] introduces ads for the free version. But not if you buy any of the pro features. Seems a fair trade, plus it's open source (which makes me slightly happier about routing all network traffic through it)

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.faircode.ne... [2] https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/releases [3] https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/blob/master/ADBLOCKING.md [4] https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/releases/tag/2.45

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

#320

Post by joelthelion »

echelon wrote: post #82

Is there a decent alternative to Chrome on Android? I am absolutely, nauseatingly sick of ads on mobile. Almost every news website I visit fills the browser with full screen ads that are infuriatingly difficult to close, change the scrolling behavior and viewport in an entirely unusable way, or try to launch Google Play Store links in the background. It's so annoying, and definitely to the point of being one of my to…

I really like Firefox with uBlock origin.
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