Bromite: A Privacy-Enhanced Chromium Fork for Android | Hacker News Reader

Bromite: A Privacy-Enhanced Chromium Fork for Android

bromite.org

78 pointsxook36 comments

I'm curious on some thoughts regarding how this compares with Firefox for Android. I'm a happy user of it. Firefox Sync is particularly nice as it allows me to sync my tabs between the desktop and my phone. I feel like syncing through Mozilla is a distinct advantage than going through Google for privacy reasons.

Taking this into account, are there any advantages of Bromite? Why would someone prefer it over Firefox?

Compatibility, better performance

Disclaimer: happy Firefox on android user

It provides a webview. Would love to have a Firefox one.

There is GeckoView. It's what the current Firefox is built on and can be used by any Android app as a replacement for web view.

Not quite. It can be used when any app calls the Android custom tab API. It is not a drop in replacement for Android's Webview.

See https://geckoview.dev

I used Bromite for a while and went back to Firefox with Ublock. From my experience, the privacy enhancement breaks enough websites to negatively counter balance the compatibility benefit of being Chrome based. Of course, you might view things differently if you actually value said enhancements.

I tried it out but sadly the Android pluggable password managers, so I had to switch back to Firefox for that reason.

Doesn't firefox for android use goolag analytics?

The new mobile firefox has no option to save pages anymore. Used to download them into PDF for reading later.

I prefer a real time choice of browser, so I use Bromite and Bromite System Webview but actually do most of my www activities with Firefox for the benefit of great extensions and the Sync feature. I test Firefox Beta regularly too.

Bromite needs extension support and it becomes the perfect browser for Android. Unfortunately the maintainer does not want that on his plate, and is willing to pull extension support so long as someone else maintains that part of the project. Understandable of course.

Kiwi Browser is open source and does have extension support, so the heavy lifting is done. It would be nice if someone picked this problem up and maintained it.

Try Yandex Browser [0]. I've tried practically every browser going for Android and it's the only one that supports both Extensions AND Text Reflow [which I think is indispensable when browsing the web on a small screen]

As an added bonus, there's also a desktop version available. So you can get all that nice syncing going on too. Just like with Chrome and Firefox.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yandex.bro...

Ungoogled Chromium for Android has builds with extension support included.

I'm writing this comment from it right now and extensions work like a charm. All I had to do was add an F-Droid repo, install Chromium and enable a flag in chrome://flags to install extensions from the Web Store.

I use uBlock Origin and Tampermonkey.

The only issue is that I have to enter chrome://extensions manually in order to manage extensions as there is no UI for them.

Personally I use Firefox with Ghostery on Android. I'll use this for YouTube instead of the official client and it works pretty well. Videos are much better without every 5 mins of video serving up an ad.

I've used Vanced YouTube for a year now and it works heaps better than the android browser version of YouTube on my opinion. Ghostery is also rather problematic after it was sold to Cliqz. I've stuck with Privacy Badger and ublock origin.

Just did a quick test, and Bromite fixes what I find an extremely annoying 'feature' of firefox...

i.e. when you back away from a page - back to the home screen - firefox leaves the tab open. Bromite (correctly IMHO) closes the session. I really dislike the ff behaviour enough to switch!

If you use this on android it won't pull your bookmarks out of chrome. To get your bookmarks, go to a PC, export your bookmarks (nearly impossible to export on android) and then drop into online storage like Drive. Then go back to your andriod > Drive > download bookmarks.html file, open Bromite > bookmarks > Import > point to downloaded .html file

An Android device rooted with Magisk can easily be reconfigured with the Bromite System Webview module. This replaces standard Chrome Webview in all www access cases not specifically handled by the user's browser. It is the logical step to fully replace Chrome with Bromite.

Now as we have a free Chromium build on Mobile, can we also have extensions support? AFAIK original Chrome has extensions support built-in but disabled at build time. Yandex has built a fork with extensions enabled but it seems even less trustworthy than Google itself.

Kiwi Browser

Any citation to think Yandex isn't trustworthy other than it being in Russia?

At least from product's point of view, they build solid products.

I use Brave[1] on my Android device. It is also a fork from Chromium, and it also comes with ad-blocking/privacy features.

[1] https://brave.com/

I was very impressed with its anti fingerprinting measures. Also the always incognito function is excellent.

Is this any better than Vanadium?

I love this app so much. Currently I use an iPhone 12 Pro and a Pixel 4a.

Why would I want to use this over Kiwi with uBlock Origin and whatnot?

It's a plain chromium fork with open source code. There's no funny business about changing how a browser should work, like putting the address bar at the bottom. And the ad blocker in it is native - No need for additional extensions.

> There's no funny business about changing how a browser should work, like putting the address bar at the bottom.

Damn those pesky innovations! Browser bars should be at the top, where they've been since before phones, where it's much easier to reach the bottom than the top!

This is a recent thing though, it's only true (IMO) with absurdly large phones.

I disagree, I have a averagely-sized phone and greatly appreciate the fact that the browser bar is at the bottom, since there's basically no way for me to reach the top of the phone without changing my grip.

It seems to me that it's only possible to reach the top (and even then just the top right, not the entire top part) if your phone is less than 3.5" tall.

Hmm. Personally I dislike the visual noise of the address bar having to move for the keyboard to load in. If I'm not mistaken, the address bar also slides off screen when you're scrolling through a page, but because it's at the bottom of the screen it goes in the opposite direction of your scroll (as you go down the page), and I find that jarring.

Maybe my hands are unusually large or something, but back in the glorious days of the Nexus 4, I was able to reach the top left corner (as a right hander) quite easily. That phone was 4.7 in diagonally, with a fairly generous bezel that GSMArena says makes it 5.9 inches in physical dimensions. (I'd argue this is misleading, because the top left corner of the screen is easier to reach than the top left corner of the phone.)

In comparison, my current phone (Moto X4), which was the smallest phone I could find at a reasonable price, is much heavier, has 6.5 inch diag physical dimensions, and is made of slick metal. I struggle to use it one handed to the point where I start to see the appeal of relocating the address bar.

The location of the address bar in Firefox for Android is configurable.

As mentioned this is configurable on Firefox but besides that it also makes it so much nicer for one handed usage. Reaching right up the top of the screen is really awkward one handed.

I use both. I use Kiwi with a range of extensions to block JS and trackers and all that, but I also use bromite for when I need to run something like a web app, it is easier than fiddling with extensions sometimes. Also I get some rendering issues in kiwi from time to time even with all extensions turned off.

Bromite has some great privacy centric features baked in, and google cruft removed. I'm not sure kiwi does. If bromite had extension support it would be perfect.

> but I also use bromite for when I need to run something like a web app, it is easier than fiddling with extensions sometimes

This is how I use FF and Chrome on the desktop.

Chrome being the basic clean version for running certain apps. Or doing professional work.

Anything based on Chromium is vulnerable to all specialised fingerprinting techniques such as this one https://niespodd.github.io/persistent-tracking-shader-cache/ and many others that I listed here https://github.com/niespodd/browser-fingerprinting

Some parts of Chromium seem to be intentionally exposing fingerprinting surfaces and, because its changing quickly with new features and addons, keeping up with patches like Bromite does is incredibly challenging task

Reply on news.ycombinator.com