Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com