
Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration - nailer
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
======
mythz
My preference for a well supported Chromium-based browser that's not Chrome
would be to use one of the "Blink" based browsers:

[https://vivaldi.com](https://vivaldi.com)

[https://brave.com](https://brave.com)

[https://www.opera.com](https://www.opera.com)

Opera was purchased by a Chinese consortium, I'm not a fan of Brave's
hijacking of ad spaces so my preference is currently vivaldi - which was
founded by co-founder and former CEO of Opera and has been adding new
innovative features at a good pace.

Edit: been having fun trying out the latest vivaldi, loving a lot of their
features like you can add website filters like greyscale, invert colors and
sepia, monospace font + disable loading images or only load from cache, etc.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dn03GeXWkAEXRP3.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dn03GeXWkAEXRP3.jpg)

Feels like they're focused on adding cool features users want, instead of
Chrome's catering to mainstream-only users and features that benefit Google.

~~~
astonex
Just to add my company's browser too,
[http://whale.naver.com/](http://whale.naver.com/)

Chromium-based, actively developed, and has Android+iOS browsers. You can use
chrome extensions with it too.

~~~
h1d
Browser is such a security nightmare, how would one want to trust from a
random vendor?

What is it's selling point?

~~~
astonex
We're actually the largest tech company in South Korea, not a completely
random vendor. We also own LINE messenger which is probably more known.

~~~
piyush_soni
Thanks. You still didn't answer what is its (unique) selling point though.
e.g. Why should I use it over this 'ungoogled Chromium' itself, or say
Firefox?

~~~
ilikehurdles
The website has a list of features that differentiate it.

------
bad_user
If you're using "Ungoogled" Chromium, you're still contributing to Chrome's
monopoly and you're still helping Google's dominance of the web.

Chromium may be open source, but its development is controlled by Google.
Unless you have Google-like resources available, you won't be able to create a
meaningful fork that your less technically savvy users can benefit from.

"Ungoogled" Chromium is a trap. Use another browser. Use Firefox. Use Safari.
Heck, use Edge (aka the new IExplorer).

Because lets stop beating around the bush ... Chrome is the new IExplorer 6.

~~~
pythonaut_16
The user isn't the problem, the developer is.

If you're developing against Chrome/Chromium, particularly "works in Chrome"
instead of developing against the published Web standards, you're support
Google & Chrome.

~~~
jononor
The developers decisions are influenced a lot on marketshare. Non-Chrome/Blink
being more common will make "Works in Chrome" development less common.

~~~
pythonaut_16
That's fair but you can easily develop for the majority Chrome marketshare by
focusing on designing and building your applications on top of the actual web
standards instead of Chrome's specific implementations. Probably 95% of the
APIs you use in a typical app will be easy to use in a standard way anyway.

WebRTC and some of the more mercurial APIs might be a challenge though.

~~~
jononor
Most developers probably try to do that. But often they only develop on
Chrome, and maybe only have automated tests in Chrome (or not at all...). And
then when it then breaks for non-Chrome, fixing tends to get lower priority
than new features and bug affecting more users.

------
lettergram
You could always switch to Firefox and use something like fastmail or
protonmail. Did that a year ago, and actually it works better on mobile imo

~~~
lucb1e
What does email have to do with switching browsers? Last I heard Gmail also
works on Firefox.

~~~
grive
Google uses non-standard extensions that only Chrome supports for Gmail and
Youtube.

For neutral email apps, Firefox runs perfectly fine. For Gmail, it will be
slightly slower than Chrome.

~~~
Algent
It's infuriating how they slow their stuff on Firefox but send optimized stuff
to IE/Edge.

Gmail is still okay once past the 2-3s loading but on YT it really test your
patience every time you click on something.

~~~
AsyncAwait
I find the YouTube Classic extension helps with that[1].

P.S. But we should all switch to PeerTube or a similar effort eventually.

1 - [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-
class...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-classic)

------
floatingatoll
“It also features some changes” says to me that this isn’t a safe fork to
recommend to others. Rather than simply releasing a de-badged instance of the
public Chrome product, it additionally includes “editorial” comments in the
form of turning various switches on or off. Use at your own risk.

~~~
chii
if they transparently list out the changes (rather than force someone to diff
the source), then it's OK.

~~~
ehsankia
Is it though? Security is a fickle thing. Unless there's a a big enough
community behind it with security experts examining the changes, I'm not sure
I'd trust some random person's changes to not introduce any exploits.

------
dedsm
Since quantum arrived, firefox developer edition is my browser of choice, and
with the containers functionality it checks all my marks.

~~~
mosselman
It was for me as well, but lately I have been experiencing incredible slow-
downs in Firefox. I thought it must be my imagination until I tried other
browsers and the difference was like between day and night. Firefox is just
too slow, even with their new engine.

~~~
noir_lord
Funnily enough I noticed this just the other day.

On
[https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/](https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/)
(usual benchmark caveats apply) Chrome scored 68.7 and FF scored 50.

That was on Fedora 28 on a ThinkPad (i7-7700HQ), I was surprised at the delta
between the two tbh.

~~~
asendra
On Safari 12, my 2015 13" rMBP scores 55, my iPhone X 89, and the new iPhone
XS 125 !? Faster than the new iMac Pro
([https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1043277162676072449](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1043277162676072449))

~~~
codydh
Safari 12, High Sierra, 2017 15" MBP scores 104. I'm surprised at these
discrepancies.

------
vbsteven
If you're so afraid of Google just don't use Chromium at all. It's a bit like
using tools developed by the NSA thinking you are _safe_ because you manually
applied patches for all the _known_ backdoors.

~~~
techntoke
Chromium is open source. MacOS, Windows, Safari, Edge, etc are not.

~~~
TimTheTinker
Safari is open source (see WebKit).

Darwin (MacOS kernel and subsystem) is also open source.

~~~
commoner
Only Safari's browser engine is open source. The browser as a whole is
released under a proprietary freeware license.

------
vemv
Coincidentally I had found out this one today and compiled it myself after a
frustrating experience with `brew install chromium` (videos wouldn't play;
inputs would blink).

I guess this has more flags set up by default, and it makes it easier to
target a stable commit to compile against.

Also as a word of caution, don't use ungoogled-chromium binaries - they never
are fully official/confirmed/reproducible. Running opaque blobs from strangers
defeats the purpose of leaving Chrome for increasing privacy.

Just bite the bullet and run the 2h compilation process yourself.

~~~
bubblethink
>Just bite the bullet and run the 2h compilation process yourself.

I don't think that's the best use of everyone's time or energy. Not to
mention, it may be more error prone, or even insecure depending on what your
base system is like. And you'll have to track updates. It seems like chromium
is problematic to build in general. Debian hasn't marked it as reproducible.
It is also not clear if it is possible to build it for Android using a Foss
stack. Various efforts to include chromium or derivatives in Fdroid have
failed.

~~~
snaky
> Various efforts to include chromium or derivatives in Fdroid have failed.

Fixed[1] in rattlesnakeos-stack[2]

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/RattlesnakeOS/comments/953dfj/v0025...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RattlesnakeOS/comments/953dfj/v0025_latest_chromium_and_fdroid/)

[2] "A cross platform tool that provisions all of the AWS infrastructure
required to build your own privacy focused Android OS on a continuous basis
with OTA updates." [https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-
stack](https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack)

~~~
voltagex_
Heh, I wonder how much that costs. You certainly don't want to be building the
whole Android tree on the free tier.

Edit: that's really well done - [https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-
stack#how-much-does-t...](https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack#how-
much-does-this-cost)

~~~
danvittegleo
I actually recently added a feature to search for the cheapest spot instance
price across a number of different regions. Right now for example the cheapest
price for the instance type used c5.4xlarge is ~$0.15/hour in us-east-2. This
equates to a full AOSP build with Chromium build included (~5.25 hours)
costing $0.80 and without Chromium (~1.75 hours) costing $0.30

~~~
voltagex_
How do you handle spot instances being shut down mid-build? Can you recover
any built artifacts before the system goes down? IIRC you get a 2 minute
warning.

~~~
danvittegleo
Right now if a spot instance terminates mid-build it doesn't attempt to save
any progress. I do have an open item to at least alert users that this has
happened though ([https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-
stack/issues/41](https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack/issues/41)).
Although if Chromium is built it will checkpoint that by saving the built
artifact to S3 and would then skip the Chromium build next time. I've found
it's much cheaper to do full builds on AWS each time rather than trying to
store the source tree for AOSP and Chromium as they are just so large.

------
NeedMoreTea
Anyone know how this differs from
[https://chromium.woolyss.com](https://chromium.woolyss.com) who has been
building Chromium, for all major platforms, without Google features for years?

~~~
odensc
Those seem to be builds of Chromium, which (even if you disable Sync and
Widevine) still has Google integration in some places.

On the other hand, `ungoogled-chromium` is a set of patches for Chromium that
removes every Google feature/integration/service from the code.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Check features:
[https://chromium.woolyss.com/#features](https://chromium.woolyss.com/#features)
It's doing more than that - No Google API key, no user identifier, no metrics
or crash reports etc.

I don't know enough of the guts of Chromium and Chrome to know if it covers
everything, but seems comprehensive to my naive eye.

------
pilif
Why does this add various flags an knobs to disable ipv6?

Disabling ipv6 has nothing to do with de-googling Chrome.

What is it with people disabling rather than fixing their ipv6 config (and
then possibly complaining about slow adoption)?

~~~
ZiiS
Chromium tests if IPv6 is working by connecting to Google's DNS servers with
it. This changes it to manual control so these servers can't track that
connection.

~~~
fulafel
There is a change to that which preserves functionality:

-// Google DNS address used for IPv6 probes. +/* RIPE NCC k.root-servers.net. 2001:7fd::1 (anycasted) */

So that's not it.

------
TekMol
It would be great if Debian could make the Chromium in their repos a de-
googled version and keep it up to date.

I have no idea how the Debian project is financed. So I don't know if it is
possible for them to assign resources to it.

But Debian has a strong history of being trustworthy. So a userfriendly
browser maintained by them would be nice.

~~~
zlatan_todoric
Debian gets sponsored by various ways but the money isn't used directly for
developers nor their time. It is volunteer based project and money is usually
used for hardware, sprints, conferences, outreachy etc.

That said Debian does take it seriously when it comes to privacy and security
so you can always report bugs on such. Do note that Debian's Chromium builds
have always disabled the infamous "mic always on" option which Chromium has
(or had, didn't check) by default.

Btw, Debian now moved to gitlab hosting (their own instance salsa.debian.org)
so it should be much easier to contribute to Debian now. :)

P.S. while Debian Developer myself, I stay away a lot from browser and
especially Chromium, and I always suggest Firefox (it has really got better
last year or so).

~~~
TekMol

        it should be much easier to contribute to Debian now
    

But aren't they constantly getting new versions of Chromium from Google? I
think going into the Debian Repo of Chromium and changing it would not be a
viable path, right? You either have to convince Google to accept your changes
too (Good luck with them accepting the de-googling haha) or you would have to
consider a life of constantly de-googling new versions of Chromium.

~~~
zlatan_todoric
Debian maintains its set of patches often (quite easy to handle with quilt in
debian/patches). We get upstream source from upstream of course and use our
patches until they get accepted (we don't force upstream to do so) when we of
course remove obsolete ones.

------
bootlooped
This seems like one of the most difficult solutions to the problem of
switching to a browser that's not Chrome.

Not only are there other browsers like Firefox and Safari, but there are other
Chromium-based browsers like Vivaldi and Opera.

I would have liked to read about some expected use-cases in the readme.

~~~
plg
why not Safari? Or is the issue non-MacOS OSs

~~~
ChristianBundy
I use Epiphany (aka GNOME Web) and it's like Safari: a minimal WebKit-based
browser with no Google integration, but it's cross-platform, open source,
_and_ features Firefox sync integration for history/bookmarks/passwords/etc. I
can't recommend it enough.

~~~
letmeaskaq7532
I am never going to use any GNOME product if intend to use it for more than a
week. Too many breaking changes, too many feature changes, too often.

~~~
ChristianBundy
I might recommend using an operating system that matches your values. Maybe
something like Debian? I have my own criticisms of the GNOME project, but I
really enjoy their release cycle.

------
ndnxhs
Rather just use Firefox. Its an insanely good browser.

~~~
invalidusernam3
Everyone keeps saying this, I think it's time for me to switch. How are the
dev tools compared to Chrome?

~~~
ndnxhs
They are mostly the same. I think they look better on Firefox.

Firefox has no websockets inspector which chrome has but it does have a CSS
grid view tool which chrome doesn't have. There was a bunch of new
improvements to the Firefox dev tools recently but I haven't checked them out
yet.

~~~
horsawlarway
Not advocating browsers either way, but as someone working a lot with css
grids lately, chrome does have this tool. Hovering over any element that has a
grid-area style, or a grid-template-* style will display the full grid on the
page.

------
MarcysVonEylau
Everyone says to dump Chrome, and suggest other platforms that are comparable
from a users perspective. But what about DevTools? Chrome has by far the best
Web Development capabilities out of any other browser. Is there any single
alternative or a set of tools that can match it?

------
EastSmith
If you want Chromium based browser - Opera or Brave seems the way to go.

~~~
ValentineC
Note that Opera is now owned by a Chinese consortium [1].

Vivaldi is the new browser by ex-Opera people.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otello_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otello_Corporation)

~~~
EastSmith
Is Vivaldi Chromium based?

~~~
lmkg
It is. I use Vivaldi, most patch notes include a version bump of Chromium.

------
aiCeivi9
> randomly selected factor in the range -0.0003% to 0.0003%, which are
> recomputed on every document initialization.

Does that actually improve privacy or marks you as 0.001% percent of web
users, that are using Bromite patches?

------
keyle
Wouldn't it be better to move onto Brave then?

------
xurukefi
Well, have fun maintaining that. Sort of reminds me of all the privacy-
improving registry hacks for Win10 that become obsolete after the next Windows
update.

------
shagen
I'm using [https://iridiumbrowser.de](https://iridiumbrowser.de)

~~~
lucb1e
Lots of browsers are mentioned in this thread, before clicking each one it
might be nice to know a few things like whether it's open source and how
development is sustained.

~~~
upofadown
In a discussion of privacy preserving browsers, open source can be assumed.
The only task is to out those that are not for some reason.

Here is the about page:

* [https://iridiumbrowser.de/about](https://iridiumbrowser.de/about)

------
niftylettuce
Great Chromium extensions you can get from GitHub:

    
    
      mkdir ungoogle-chromium-extensions
    
      cd ungoogled-chromium-extensions
    
      git clone https://github.com/zenorocha/codecopy
    
      git clone https://github.com/philc/vimium.git
    
      git clone https://github.com/OctoLinker/OctoLinker.git
    
      git clone https://github.com/ilGur1132/Smart-HTTPS.git
    
      git clone https://github.com/ovity/octotree.git
    
      git clone https://github.com/mrcoles/full-page-screen-capture-chrome-extension.git
    
      wget https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/download/1.17.0/uBlock0.chromium.zip

~~~
niftylettuce
[https://github.com/jswanner/DontFuckWithPaste](https://github.com/jswanner/DontFuckWithPaste)

------
ktpsns
I love the concept of the fingerprinting deception features

    
    
      --fingerprinting-canvas-measuretext-noise
      --fingerprinting-canvas-image-data-noise
      --fingerprinting-client-rects-noise
    

I wonder whether we can get similar features in Mozilla Firefox or regular
Chromium? Probably with an extension? Is anybody aware of something like that?
Or does it really need to be baked into the core of the browser?

------
known
[https://prism-break.org/en/all/#web-browsers](https://prism-
break.org/en/all/#web-browsers) FTW

------
mehrdadn
So I tried moving off Chrome 68 to Firefox 62 today, and it's _quite_
noticeably slower than Chrome. Here's a couple GIFs from Gmail to show what I
mean [1]. I start both of them at the exact same frame that I release the
Enter key, so you can see exactly how much longer Firefox takes. Notice that
it takes longer to render the Star/Important icons, too (including the very
noticeable flash of placeholder text), not merely load the page. The situation
gets even worse when I install extensions, but these are on profiles that have
already visited this page, but which are otherwise fresh. (Edit: Trying it on
Facebook with a clean profile now. I realized I hadn't cleaned the profile
before testing non-Google sites.)

So I have to say, I'm really baffled. How are people switching to Firefox and
finding it to be so fast? Is this speed difference unnoticeable for everyone
but me?

UPDATE:

On Facebook, I see similar speeds without extensions. However, when I browse
with my usual extensions, Firefox is again noticeably slower -- even though
the extensions in Firefox are literally a subset of those in Chrome. Are other
people's experiences similar?

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/1oFr5Q7](https://imgur.com/a/1oFr5Q7)

~~~
AsyncAwait
> Firefox 62 today, and it's quite noticeably slower than Chrome. Here's a
> couple GIFs from Gmail to show what I mean

If you use any Google service in Firefox, it's slowed down by Google on
purpose, so you don't switch. I'd use a 3rd party email client or switch off
Gmail, otherwise I just let Google know their sleazy tactics work.

Other than that, I notice Firefox having some performance issues specifically
on macOS. I'm using it as my primary browser on Linux and since v57 it has
been super fast.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
I love the anti-fingerprinting features and I just hope more people actively
use them.

------
quickben
Awesome. Keep up the good work!

------
jakeogh
Gentoo:

emerge layman ; laymen -a alinefr ; emerge www-client/ungoogled-chromium

~~~
trulyrandom
Please don't recommend installing ancient versions of Chromium.

~~~
jakeogh
True. Bad advice on my part. For ref that gets you:

www-client/ungoogled-chromium-55.0.2883.75.1::alinefr

Really, I wish gentoo would just -9999 most everything not in the core tree.
Practically every custom ebuild in my own overlay does.

------
user812
when I compile it on mac, it throws some errors. As a noob, I can't use
ungoogled chromium apparently.

------
xaduha
Opera is fine. Chinese connection doesn't bother me.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Closed source, however, might bother one, especially in the context of privacy
and trust.

------
browsercoin
this kills firefox for me.

------
nadont8
Google Chromium, sans integration with Google, and sans updates. Thanks but no
thanks.

~~~
vemv
Chromium updates are blobs and tend to have close ties with Google.

~~~
SquareWheel
Unless you're compiling yourself, all software is "blobs".

~~~
vemv
\- Many dependencies of dev projects are simply source files which will be
compiled on-the-fly. Or at least that's the case in the languages I normally
work with.

\- Some blobs are more trustworthy than others.

------
orionblastar
What about SWARE Iron?
[https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php](https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php)

It is supposed to be the version of Chromium without the Google crap, right? I
use it at times to test it out as I test out different websites on different
browsers.

They have it for different platforms:
[https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_download.php](https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_download.php)

~~~
Zarel
SRWare Iron is a scam:

[http://www.insanitybit.com/2012/06/23/srware-iron-
browser-a-...](http://www.insanitybit.com/2012/06/23/srware-iron-browser-a-
real-private-alternative-to-chrome-21/)

Basically any other privacy-oriented Chromium fork would be better. Iridium
seems nice?

~~~
orionblastar
Thank you I did not know. Someone recommended it to me one day as an
alternative to Chrome.

Iridium is this the one?
[https://iridiumbrowser.de/](https://iridiumbrowser.de/)

~~~
Zarel
Yep, that's the one.

~~~
orionblastar
Thank you. I took a big hit on posting the Iron browser, but someone has to
know about it so we know it is scamware.

