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Comment by alphabet9000 | Hacker News Reader

Not mentioned in the article is the 'ungoogled Chromium' project, which can be downloaded here [0] or compiled from here [1]

[0] https://chromium.woolyss.com (look for the ungoogled tag)

[1] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

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Probably because your only options to get them on mac/windows are to download binaries from some random guy off the internet (who the hell is "Marmaduke" and why should I trust him?), or compiling it yourself (~1 hour build time on a mid-tier desktop CPU).

I use Ungoogled Chromium on Gentoo, and it takes my machine 5 hours. Well worth it, because I know that what is built is the source I see. Even FireFox is a binary on Gentoo.

Just my 2 cents.

I empathize, but for a project as complex as a browser, how valid is this though? It's basically reliant on "the community", of which ungoogled chromium has a vanishingly tiny one, to flag any potential issues in a massive, complicated code base that is likely constantly moving. Sure, compiling yourself eliminates the middle-man who might have compiled the binary for you, but the trust element is still very much there. You're trusting eloston and other project maintainers.

There is some trust there, but again, I can and have looked at what he's doing. Plus the fact that someone who has taken Google out of Chromium probably cares about privacy.

It's still less trust required than the trust required for Google.

It's not for everyone, not even close. But I am glad it's an option for me.

And that probably means you don't rebuild the browser every time an update is available, because you don't want to load down your machine for five hours right now. And, in turn, that means you're vulnerable for significantly longer than you would be with a more centralized build.

You're talking to a gentoo user. They compile every chance they get.

I...can neither confirm nor deny how much I love watching compiles happen...

I update every night, including Ungoogled-Chromium. I'm not awake for the night, so why not do it then?

Gentoo may be rolling release, but they batch the updates every day.

firefox-bin is a binary on Gentoo. Regular firefox is not. You're not pushed toward the binary package at all.

My mistake, though it seems that it might be default for something, since it is installed on my system.

Edit: figured out what it is: firefox-bin can be installed, no fuss, but firefox requires elogind or systemd, neither of which I have on my system.

ungoogled Chromium is well known and good. Like uBlock Origin.

Why on earth are you complaining about compile time?

There always is a necessary trade off between time exhausted and privacy/security

I'm not, but both are barriers for the typical Wired reader.

Good luck having random user to do that.

I compiled it once and it took several hours, like 10. So I left it and came back only to find I was prompted and the prompt timed out and the process ended.

Downloaded a binary from somewhere (I don't remember but it was some repo I have used before that I trust) and it needed some specific older version of some C library (I also don't remember) that I had to mess with for compatibility.

Ungoogled chromium is a bit messy. I use it, it is my go to browser, but it certainly isn't something you're going to get by downloading installer.exe from "the official website."

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