If I recall correctly, in a recent Tek @Wendell said that he builds his own version of the Chrome browser, with all the evil spying features stripped out.
I was wondering if that version is available on Github or somewhere else.
Not sure since i don't use Chrome and never will, But just like Firefox chrome has settings like about:config. i think they are called chrome://flags as i recall you can change a lot in here.
but if you feel heroic go nuts with
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/54.0.2816.1
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Yeah I imagine it's a build of chromium he builds
Isn't the only spying features in chromium just the ones you can disable in the regular settings?
This also reminded me of Iridium Browser which is a fork of chromium that is supposed to have enhanced privacy (never tried it though).
Chances are, he doesn't trust the settings
From what I understood when he said it, he used chromium with some plugins.
Chrome is basically chromium with some extra plugins and google "stuff". As chromium is OpenSource, it can be considered "safer"(theoretically).
I think he mentioned a plugin for watching netflix. Netflix doesn't work on chromium out of the box because it depends on a DRM plugin, called Widevine, that comes preinstalled in Chrome.
It's possible to extract the widevine plugin from the Chrome package and use it on chromium to watch Netflix, I use it. Not hard to do in Arch, there is even a script on AUR to install widevine on chromium, shouldn't be very hard to do on other distros as well.
I just have chromium+widevine. @wendell might have more stuff installed...
+1 on chromium. It also doesn't come with flash player built-in. (Chrome does)
I really didn't pay a lot of attention when watching the video, but I think he actually builds his own Chromium (not Chrome, sorry) and he mentioned that it was a pain in the ass to strip out all that junk with every update. (Or something among the lines of that.) I doubt that he just uses the normal thing with plugins. I couldn't imagine that to be such a pain with every update.
And yeah, standard Chrome is definitely not an option for me. I mean seriously, you would have to check for new settings with every update... and even then, how could you be sure that they aren't still spying on you. The "GoogleUpdate" service or scheduled task or whatever it was already scared the shit out of me. And think about all the subtle things they might do. Like how about using the google dns instead of the system specified one? All of the sudden google would know about every single domain you visit... I mean seriously I wouldn't be surprised at all if that was exactly what Chrome is doing already.
And yes, Flash is so painfully vulnerable. I really wouldn't be surprised if Flash was the No1 entry door for viruses these days.
Then there is performance. Electrolysis technology is giving Chrome such a crazy performance boost over other browsers; it's nuts. And Firefox will still needs at least another yeah until they get it to work stable.
And the fact that one broken javascript in a website can easily crash the whole main thread in Firefox, meaning one tab crashes all tabs, is a no-go for me, too.
And finally the developer tools. All I can say about this is: Holy crap! Chrome's developer tools are sooo many years in the future. They are way more sophisticated and useful and complete than the ones of Firefox. Chrome is so much more advanced in this aspect that I think that Firefox might not even have reached Chrome's current level in 2 years from now.
And believe me, being able to properly view or debug into dynamically generated scripts or being able to capture websocket packets, view and modify the localstorage and all that stuff is super necessary when you're doing some complex and modern coding. And what about things like being able to modify the source code on-the-fly? - Extremely time saving!
But yeah, Firefox can't do any of that and Chrome has been able to these things for like 4 years!
And those are just the few things that came to my mind during like 15 minutes of writing. I'm sure I could give you at lease a dozen of other reasons for why Chrome is superior, why I don't trust Chrome and why Firefox sucks atm if I would keep thinking.
Well in Firefox defense. Javascript is getting abused or overused on way too many sites. Sometimes i see a website loading 10-20 js code without only of them benefit me from my website experience.
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
can always go fore Icecat the browser that blocks or rewrite most of your js :p
I didn't fully compile Firefox but i changed a lot of stuff. Like some flags in about:config, i myself didn't like i was redirected to Google or other search engine when i made a typo in URL. Now i just get a old fashioned error.
Does chromium have the same vulnerabilities to spy ware as chrome ?
No, definitely not. First of all, in a way you could call Chrome per se spyware. And secondly, as already mentioned, Chrome comes with Flash. And new Flash vulnerabilities are found on a daily basis. Well, not really daily, but it certainly feels like it.
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Bugs in flash are indeed extreme that you would rethink your life before opening that portal from hell. It's amazing they didn't just disabled it. It not like the web still needs it.
Does anyone remember in which Tek it was and at which minute he said it?
it's 2016 and you still use flash???!
get off my planet
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I recently learned about a project called ungoogled-chromium. It basically allows you to compile a version of Chromium that has all the privacy invading and Google stuff stripped out. Further it actually compiles every single binary that usually would come precompiled.
Building the whole thing seems to be quite simple on Linux: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/BUILDING.md
On Windows it seems to requires Visual Studio though. But ever since Microsoft started to put telemetry code into everything that gets compiled with Visual Studio, I don't trust it anymore... So I guess on Windows I'll have to stick with Firefox.
But I have to say, since the last time that I posted, Firefox has actually improved tremendously!! Especially from a developer perspective. I mean we still have no Live Edit in the debugger. But Electrolysis and WebExtensions have improved immensely and we can finally mess with localstorage, cookies, indexed db etc in the developer tools. And there also is a more or less official dev tools extension to mess with WebSockets, which is awesome. And in march I think we'll finally get await and async for javascript.
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