As a happy FF user on Mac, Android and Windows, I'm badly missing FF add-ons for iOS (iPadOS actually) - this is due to Apple's policies on iOS prohibiting apps from downloading plugins outside of the App Store. The web without an ad-blocker and proper cookie cleanup (not to talk about FF containers) is impractical to me right now.
Maybe I (or someone) inspired by custom browser project like the OPs, will someday bundle FF with crucial add-ons for iOS and ship that through Github. It would probably need a dev account to install it in iOS/iPadOS, but it sure would be worth it. What I don't know is if regular FF add-ons (uBlock, cookie autodelete, etc.) will work on iOS FF since it runs with a bundled Safari webkit renderer, another Apple iPhone v1 2008-era-restriction for such delicate piece of hardware (weak battery, mem and cpu) that makes no sense now with powerful 2020 devices.
Safari is my daily driver, but I switch to Chrome when doing web development because the development tools were vastly superior (10 years ago I was in love with Firebug, but I don't think it's kept up with Chromium's dev tools).
A lot of things don't work on Firefox, or work worse.
If you are against Google pushing their "evil" stuff on people -- not just you, but all people -- well, Google thinks they can get away with that because people consider their browser better (or those people are just more comfortable with Chrome). Stuff like this, i.e. more options for people, is actually very helpful in reigning Google in a bit. Other Chromium based browsers such as Edge or Brave help as well.
BTW, my personal pet peeve with Firefox is lack of MIDI support, but there are lots of other things. I like that I can search Google by voice in Chrome, and my 6 year old loves that especially. (I don't know if ungoogled-chromium can do that though) I like the way you can grab tabs and drag them around and you know where they will go with Chrome before you drop them. (I have several monitors so this is a many-times-a-day thing for me and it feels awful in Firefox, comparatively). And I hate the ads and recommended sites on the "new tab" page.
I keep a copy of Chromium around to test stuff I develop or for the occasional website that doesn't work in Firefox. Ungoogled chromium importance will increase with the continued decline of Firefox's absolute and relative market shares.
Maybe you don't care about open source browser engine monopoly as much as ubiquitous monitoring?
Without this project, there wouldn't be a way to really make use of the fact that chromium is open source. It frees the world's best browser engine, which IMO is awesome.
That's hardly fighting Chrome's dominance. The people who Google hired to write Chrome came from Mozilla. Also Mozilla pays its own developers with money that comes from a deal with Google. The online advertising industry, Google's customer base, is supporting and indirectly controlling both of these browsers. Those "evil" things that Googles does are done to offer services to that customer base. Whatever "fight" you might imagine between browsers is, with respect to end users, illusory. Neither browser can pull the plug on the online ad business, they both depend on it. That is the source of the "evil".
Chrome has better security guarantees, and Firefox is also spyware, transmitting user activity to Mozilla without consent.
You could make an un-Mozilla’d Firefox, but at that point you’re better off running this, because once you remove the spyware, Chrome is actually a better browser.
I love Firefox and I'm really thankful for it, but the power consumption is just too high on Mac. Firefox instantly heats up my laptop even with just a single tab open. I like it better than Chrome, but I just can't take the battery/CPU hit for now.
I'm sorry but I'm not going to install a browser built by random people.
> NOTE: These binaries are provided by anyone who are willing to build and submit them. Because these binaries are not necessarily reproducible, authenticity cannot be guaranteed; In other words, there is always a non-zero probability that these binaries may have been tampered with.
>"I'm sorry but I'm not going to install a browser built by random people."
This.
Entering credit card information, bank account info, website logins, etc. into a binary uploaded by $random_internet_person is an absolutely terrible idea. Chrome is a dumpster fire as far as privacy goes, but I'd still trust it over that. This is why I use the new Chromium Edge as my main driver these days. Chromium reliability without the Google nonsense. Yes, you're still trusting Microsoft, but they own my OS already anyways.
ungoogled-chromium has absolutely zero telemetry. It's the gold standard for browsers and a rare breath of fresh air in the polluted world of modern software.
Firefox, in contrast, is nowhere close. It includes trackers, "pings", "experiments", ads, sponsored search engines, bundled extensions, and phone-homes. Despire Mozilla's open-source and privacy rhetoric, its level of bundled spyware is not very different from any other commercial software product.
>its level of bundled spyware is not very different from any other commercial software product.
Maybe that is more a sign of how necessary it is, rather than indication that Mozilla is somehow an evil company.
"Phoning home" let's them know which features are being used and need to be maintained, and where the bugs are occurring. Experiments are how Firefox tests improvements in a controlled way. Sponsored search engines are how Firefox can exist at all.
To me, telemetry is ok. That is, how the software runs, which operations are slow, where crashes or recoverable errors happen. Anonymous technical stuff, preferably in a user-unelectable form.
What I'd be concerned about is personal profiling, knowing which sites I visit, which forms I submit (including web search), etc.
In the world full surveillance you think all telemetry is wrong.
There were better days and there are better worlds. In Arch Linux and Debian you have to find out and install telemetry by yourself [1], [2]. It provides neat insides to the community.
Like in Arch Linux Firefox is on the rise [3], Chromium on the fall [4] and Google Chrome while small is constant [5]. While Debian community strongly prefers Firefox ESR [6] over Firefox [7] and Chromium [8].
Yes, statistics skewed to those who participate in community [9], but same could be said about forums, wiki, chatrooms, mailing lists. That's fine - community care most about those who help community. Anonymized highly technical telemetry is easiest way. I opt in. Bonus point - Firefox Public Data Report [10].
Yeah. Even Brave, a chromium browser with ad and tracking protection built in, has been injecting more and more of their own ads.
A browser that's Actually Not Shady sounds pretty cool. Though bummed to hear in a sibling comment that they don't provide builds.
Would be cool to see a service that provides UC builds, updates, and sync in some kind of transparently secure way. Perhaps with optional ad blocking. Maybe $10/yr or something folks would pay. I would.
What I didn't understand (or maybe I missed it), is all these extra features and they didn't include ability to install extensions not signed by overlords.
Chrome sends X-Client-Data headers to DoubleClick and other Google-owned properties, which can be used for tracking purposes. There's no way to disable this behavior.
The header contains a "low entropy" random ID generated by Chrome upon installation. Coupled with other data, this can be used to track users even after clearing cookies and in private mode.
You can disable most of the telemetry with command line switches like --disable-background-networking and --disable-sync, but some things like field trials and doubleclick fingerprinting cannot be excluded in regular Chrome/Chromium AFAIK.
Even basic things like auto-suggestions in the URL bar can't be turned off any more. A while ago there used to be an option for it but it was removed. So when you enter an URL it's automatically sent to Google as you type.
I am a regular user of both chrome and ungoogled chromium browser. here are my insights: even though both are fork of chromium, UC consume much less ram as compared to chrome. a youtube page will take ~450mb in chrome but same page will take ~280mb (tested personally). You can install all chrome extensions in UC, there's also a seperate extension for updating these extensions. you can't "sync" data in UC (bookmarks, passwords, cards etc). there's no straight forward way to update UC.
Non-technical Chrome users who cannot "un-Google" can at least set shortcuts to clear cookies, history, etc.
Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines
Click "Add" and instead of typing a search engine URL, enter
chrome://settings/clearBrowserData#c
For "Keyword" one can enter a single character, e.g., "c".
Select options, e.g., Advanced tab, Time range: All time, check all boxes. (The boxes will remain checked on the next invocation.)
Now, whenever the user wants to clear the browser data, she can just type "c" in the Address Bar.
No need to keep typing "chrome://settings" or keeping a tab open for settings.
User-agent can be changed through Developer Tools, without the need for extensions, however other headers are not accessible. Technical users who avoid using extensions can use a localhost proxy to delete headers, including Cookie where it is unnecessary.
Despite all the user fingerprinting that is done using HTTP headers such as User-Agent, relatively few sites actually require User-Agent and other headers. For almost all sites, the only requirement to successfully retrieve the page is the Host and, often enough, Connection headers.
Specific resource requests can also be blocked in Developer Tools without installing extensions as a "poor man's ad blocker". Using Developer Tools, dummy Javascript resources can be loaded from local sources to remove undesirable page characteristics.
However neither ad-blockers nor stripping headers prevents all the fingerprinting. If one is not happy with browser-based tracking, then using a "modern browser" with so many advanced features to retrieve a page of text is a trade-off, and, arguably, overkill.
I use ungoogled-chromium for sites that don't behave well on Firefox (due to needing third-party cookies and so on). I find the extension[0] allowing for the installation and updating of Google Chrome App Store extensions to be immensely valuable.
FWIW, Microsoft Edge on macOS is a better Chrome than Google Chrome. It's based on Chromium and has shown superior performance on my machine. Plus, it has a nicer settings menu than Google Chrome.
[+] [-] ornornor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojosilva|5 years ago|reply
Maybe I (or someone) inspired by custom browser project like the OPs, will someday bundle FF with crucial add-ons for iOS and ship that through Github. It would probably need a dev account to install it in iOS/iPadOS, but it sure would be worth it. What I don't know is if regular FF add-ons (uBlock, cookie autodelete, etc.) will work on iOS FF since it runs with a bundled Safari webkit renderer, another Apple iPhone v1 2008-era-restriction for such delicate piece of hardware (weak battery, mem and cpu) that makes no sense now with powerful 2020 devices.
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbrown451|5 years ago|reply
If you are against Google pushing their "evil" stuff on people -- not just you, but all people -- well, Google thinks they can get away with that because people consider their browser better (or those people are just more comfortable with Chrome). Stuff like this, i.e. more options for people, is actually very helpful in reigning Google in a bit. Other Chromium based browsers such as Edge or Brave help as well.
BTW, my personal pet peeve with Firefox is lack of MIDI support, but there are lots of other things. I like that I can search Google by voice in Chrome, and my 6 year old loves that especially. (I don't know if ungoogled-chromium can do that though) I like the way you can grab tabs and drag them around and you know where they will go with Chrome before you drop them. (I have several monitors so this is a many-times-a-day thing for me and it feels awful in Firefox, comparatively). And I hate the ads and recommended sites on the "new tab" page.
[+] [-] est31|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabaraz|5 years ago|reply
I need device emulator (with editable user string), request blocking and remote device (for webview debugging).
[+] [-] rattray|5 years ago|reply
Without this project, there wouldn't be a way to really make use of the fact that chromium is open source. It frees the world's best browser engine, which IMO is awesome.
[+] [-] pwdisswordfish2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einpoklum|5 years ago|reply
2. Some websites are developed targeting Chrome(ium) and even check for either that or a Microsoft browser. Yes, that still happens.
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
You could make an un-Mozilla’d Firefox, but at that point you’re better off running this, because once you remove the spyware, Chrome is actually a better browser.
[+] [-] PascLeRasc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta17711771|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snidane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stillbourne|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alibert|5 years ago|reply
> NOTE: These binaries are provided by anyone who are willing to build and submit them. Because these binaries are not necessarily reproducible, authenticity cannot be guaranteed; In other words, there is always a non-zero probability that these binaries may have been tampered with.
[+] [-] aphextron|5 years ago|reply
This.
Entering credit card information, bank account info, website logins, etc. into a binary uploaded by $random_internet_person is an absolutely terrible idea. Chrome is a dumpster fire as far as privacy goes, but I'd still trust it over that. This is why I use the new Chromium Edge as my main driver these days. Chromium reliability without the Google nonsense. Yes, you're still trusting Microsoft, but they own my OS already anyways.
[+] [-] mbakke|5 years ago|reply
If your distro is unsupported, you can install Nix or Guix and use that to install ungoogled-chromium.
[+] [-] kiddico|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnt38|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dundarious|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefee|5 years ago|reply
Firefox, in contrast, is nowhere close. It includes trackers, "pings", "experiments", ads, sponsored search engines, bundled extensions, and phone-homes. Despire Mozilla's open-source and privacy rhetoric, its level of bundled spyware is not very different from any other commercial software product.
[+] [-] SquareWheel|5 years ago|reply
Maybe that is more a sign of how necessary it is, rather than indication that Mozilla is somehow an evil company.
"Phoning home" let's them know which features are being used and need to be maintained, and where the bugs are occurring. Experiments are how Firefox tests improvements in a controlled way. Sponsored search engines are how Firefox can exist at all.
[+] [-] nine_k|5 years ago|reply
What I'd be concerned about is personal profiling, knowing which sites I visit, which forms I submit (including web search), etc.
[+] [-] sergeykish|5 years ago|reply
There were better days and there are better worlds. In Arch Linux and Debian you have to find out and install telemetry by yourself [1], [2]. It provides neat insides to the community.
Like in Arch Linux Firefox is on the rise [3], Chromium on the fall [4] and Google Chrome while small is constant [5]. While Debian community strongly prefers Firefox ESR [6] over Firefox [7] and Chromium [8].
Yes, statistics skewed to those who participate in community [9], but same could be said about forums, wiki, chatrooms, mailing lists. That's fine - community care most about those who help community. Anonymized highly technical telemetry is easiest way. I opt in. Bonus point - Firefox Public Data Report [10].
[1] Arch Linux pkgstats (2008) https://popcon.debian.org/
[2] Debian Popularity Contest (2004) https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/
[3] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages/firefox
[4] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages/chromium
[5] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages/google-chrome
[6] https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=firefox-esr
[7] https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=firefox
[8] https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=chromium
[9] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Getting_Involved
[10] https://data.firefox.com/
[+] [-] rattray|5 years ago|reply
A browser that's Actually Not Shady sounds pretty cool. Though bummed to hear in a sibling comment that they don't provide builds.
Would be cool to see a service that provides UC builds, updates, and sync in some kind of transparently secure way. Perhaps with optional ad blocking. Maybe $10/yr or something folks would pay. I would.
[+] [-] gear54rus|5 years ago|reply
Maybe there's an easy way to patch that in?
[+] [-] ta17711771|5 years ago|reply
Hilariously...its telemetry to Google is actually more invasive than Chrome, if you MITM it.
[+] [-] daakus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xy|5 years ago|reply
The header contains a "low entropy" random ID generated by Chrome upon installation. Coupled with other data, this can be used to track users even after clearing cookies and in private mode.
[+] [-] NiekvdMaas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est31|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerrygoyal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rattray|5 years ago|reply
Jerrygoyal, any other pros or cons so far?
[+] [-] bmn__|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whydoyoucare|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_imho|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paco3346|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j-james|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwdisswordfish2|5 years ago|reply
Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines
Click "Add" and instead of typing a search engine URL, enter
For "Keyword" one can enter a single character, e.g., "c".Select options, e.g., Advanced tab, Time range: All time, check all boxes. (The boxes will remain checked on the next invocation.)
Now, whenever the user wants to clear the browser data, she can just type "c" in the Address Bar.
No need to keep typing "chrome://settings" or keeping a tab open for settings.
User-agent can be changed through Developer Tools, without the need for extensions, however other headers are not accessible. Technical users who avoid using extensions can use a localhost proxy to delete headers, including Cookie where it is unnecessary.
Despite all the user fingerprinting that is done using HTTP headers such as User-Agent, relatively few sites actually require User-Agent and other headers. For almost all sites, the only requirement to successfully retrieve the page is the Host and, often enough, Connection headers.
Specific resource requests can also be blocked in Developer Tools without installing extensions as a "poor man's ad blocker". Using Developer Tools, dummy Javascript resources can be loaded from local sources to remove undesirable page characteristics.
However neither ad-blockers nor stripping headers prevents all the fingerprinting. If one is not happy with browser-based tracking, then using a "modern browser" with so many advanced features to retrieve a page of text is a trade-off, and, arguably, overkill.
[+] [-] john61|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sicromoft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ferros|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|5 years ago|reply
I have it installed almost exclusively to use the UniFi web UI, which is buggy as hell on Safari.
[+] [-] niksmac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praveen9920|5 years ago|reply
It could be first step for de-googlifying
[+] [-] floatingatoll|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] siraben|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store
[+] [-] keyle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] behnamoh|5 years ago|reply
*no affiliation with MS.