A number of features or background services communicate with Google servers despite the absence of an associated Google account or compiled-in Google API keys. Furthermore, the normal build process for Chromium involves running Google’s own high-level commands that invoke many scripts and utilities, some of which download and use pre-built binaries provided by Google. Even the final build output includes some pre-built binaries. Fortunately, the source code is available for everything.
ungoogled-chromium tries to fix these things.
While interesting, I’ll stick with Firefox and DuckDuckGo as my primary… which is “ungoogled” as well. But I still use Chrome from time to time so I think this is a great idea and will likely switch to using it for the times Firefox gets in my way (very rare, all things considered). I refuse to stop using DuckDuckGo, however. :p
I’d use ddg, however its search results just don’t cut it when looking for very specific topics.
Wouldn’t this be the same as SRWare Iron? Which has been around from ages? Actually posting from it now…. since my Firefox Development build crashes a bit much for me at the moment.
It combines the Iron patchset with several other patchsets such as Inox and Debian.
Given what I know about Debian patches, I suspect that Iron might still be relying on the “download a prebuilt binary of dependency X” behaviour in the default build scripts.
Why not contibute to firefox ?
I mean really creating a fork of chrominum will never solve your problem.
Help a independent solution(firefox).
i have been using firefox for past 8-9 years(my first browser actually). It provides everything that a user need from browser. It follows HTML5 standards etc.
This reminds me of : http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you…
I know there are some is issues with firefox, but these people can also work on those issues instead of creating a fork.
Otherwise it will be too late for everyone.
Why bother forking forking the lesser option?
Because at some point that attitude leads to the lesser option disappearing entirely.
And the ‘lesser option’ may actually hold some benefits.
When Apple created WebKit, the did so by forking KHTML, which was a rendering engine created for the KDE platform, and virtually unknown outside of KDE users. They could just as easily have forked the Mozilla engine. They could also very easily have found the cash to buy Operasoft and use their engine. It wasn’t the best engine out there, but they chose KHTML, and the rest is history.
And as your point proves, Opera no longer uses their own engine, and instead uses webkit as well.
Funny thing is, last time I used Konqueror (probably 1-2 years ago) they had the option for both KHTML and Webkit, and they rendered the same page slightly differently.
Webkit itself seems like it’s not exactly the same across the board. While Opera now pretty much renders / acts the same way as Chrome/Chromium, it does not act the same as Epiphany, which also uses Webkit. Not sure if this is a difference in which particular revision of webkit it’s using or if it is some specific additions depending on browser. Could even bee that I think Epiphany uses the GTK3 implementation of webkit.
Either way, I prefer Firefox as well. It just seems to behave more like an X11 program than Chrome/Chromium/Opera. I also like DuckDuckGo, and on the rare occasion it doesn’t find something, it always has !g shortcut for google.
Chrome isn’t Webkit. It forked as Blink years ago. Gtk3 and Qt4/5 webkit browsers are using WebKit2, like Safari. Gtk2 is stuck on WebKit 1.x which is why the first generation of minimal vim-like browsers all shriveled up and died.
Well, Firefox is kind of ungoogled in the first place, so there’s no need to fork just for that purpose. And I guess the point here is that Chrome is overall a better browser, so people want to use it, but the available standard options are a concern for user privacy.
I’m not even sure if these kinds of hacks are a contribution to greater good in the sense that most of them aren’t suitable for merging into the official source code, because they try to alter intentional behaviour.
In the past, Firefox developers have been difficult to work with in my experience. The same problem exists with most open source projects though, if you’re not the big 3 you get ignored. If you’re using Linux, windows or mac os, people will take your patches. If you’re trying to get anything else to work, they have excuses like bloat, irrelevance, etc. Well of course the other OS is irrelevant if it doesn’t have firefox right? That’s what you’re trying to fix.
I’ve gone through re-porting firefox a few times and the security manager code is a nightmare every single time. Then there’s the crap code added for HTML5 video/audio, etc around firefox 4. It hasn’t gotten any better. In fact, things have gotten worse because now it fails to build with some of this stuff disabled. At that point, you’re battling the third party libraries compatibility with your OS on top of firefox.
Anyone who thinks firefox is awesome hasn’t tried to get it to work in another OS before without the UNAME already being supported.
I will say that they’ve made huge leaps on memory usage and performance in recent releases on supported platforms. I’ve actually considered switching back to it in OS X because it does feel faster than chrome and safari now. The UI stuttering from chrome isn’t there.
With all this said, other browsers have their own issues. Chromium has a terrible build system. It’s fragile, non standard and buggy. When I actually prefer automake/autoconf you know things are bad.
Another issue with chromium is that if you actually enable all the google services, you have to give it a developer token. If you’re building packages for an OS for redistribution, those hits go against your account and the limits are pretty low. It seems counter intuitive that google wouldn’t want people to access their own services.
Hahaha, you know what google means nowadays right? It is no longer only a search giant but also the synonym for some criminal elements of a certain racial group. They adopted this moniker so they could not be censored.
Actually it strikes me that it took so long for somebody to come up with that.
It didn’t, this is just the most recent effort.
Other ones include:
https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
https://iridiumbrowser.de/
Ungoogled Chromium appears to be more up to date and to merge a few differenet patches and doesn’t replace Google-tracking with Iridium-tracking (albeite that tracking is less nefarious and more about “it helps us find what else Google is trying to track so we can shut those holes too”).
Also QtWebEngine from Qt, is Chromium with all the Google taken out, but it lacks the browser then.