Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

I wish the open source world would wrap Blink into a usable browser product that doesn't have all the things we might not like about Chrome (or at least that allows a lot of settings for removing them and customizing it in ways that Google may not want to do with Chrome, because they don't think it is in their corporate interest).

It's a lot easier than building a whole browser from scratch. I salute what Mozilla is doing but I still don't want to use their browser because it just isn't as good, in my opinion. (Firefox also does't support the MIDIAccess API yet, which I need)

Obviously a lot of people agree that Chrome is better. I'm a lot more likely to use Microsoft's Blink browser than I was to use Microsoft's fully proprietary browser, but even better would be a fully open source, community steered "UnGoogled Chrome".

It exists: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

The general concern about projects along these lines, e.g. IceWeasel, is that they won't keep up with security patches as quickly as the project it's forking. Maybe that's less of a concern here since they aren't trying to recreate an older version but are just tearing out some "phone home" calls and changing some defaults.

> they won't keep up with security patches as quickly as the project it's forking

And they often take a baby-with-the-bathwater approach to removing Google from the picture. For instance, that project completely disables Safe Browsing, requires a convoluted process to install extensions, and breaks automatic extension updates -- in each case, because the functionality depends on a Google-hosted service.

What is the purpose of removing Google from the browser, if you do not remove it from all parts of the browser? There only needs to be one automatic communication channel to Google to make such effort worthless.

I don't know. What is the purpose of removing Google from the browser? Is it to prevent specific types of tracking, or is it simply to erase Google's name from the project?

Personally my preferred approach would be to make a version that makes a ton of features optional, but if you want them, you can have them.

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