Google Chromium, sans integration with Google
ungoogled-software.github.io
ungoogled-software.github.io
>>>IMPORTANT: 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. For your consideration, each download page lists the GitHub user that submitted those binaries.
My current position is to step wide and rather carefully around anything by/from Google.
Rather than take such statements at face value, here's an example of one such instance that probably hurts its credibility: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
Also, they're not exactly a world apart from Google in some respects either, for example: https://killedbymozilla.com/ vs https://killedbygoogle.com/ (though i guess the amount of projects also illustrates the difference in their sizes)
However, that's not to say that we even have many viable alternatives to Firefox either: https://batsov.com/articles/2021/11/28/firefox-is-the-only-a...
Personally, i think that we're past the peak of Firefox and are currently in the midst of it fading away, which i expect will come to its conclusion in the following decade. Apart from that, we basically have just a bunch of browsers that are all similar to Chromium.
Essentially, Chrome will have probably lived long enough to kill IE by becoming the next IE.
Who knows where the web standards will go when there will only be Google backed browsers: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
One day they added a small widget to buy crypto in the new tab page. That was the breaking point for me. Like it happened with Firefox ads, I started to understand that Brave was working against me too.
It's also like a few clicks to turn off brave settings. It's less setup for brave than I go through on any new video game settings lol
But all we got is Linux on the desktop...
The only reason Linux is popular on servers is because it has huge corporate sponsorship. Big players figured it it's more beneficial for their bottom line to commoditize the backend infrastructure and invest in OSS. Same is happening with developer tools.
It's not happening with anything consumer facing because everyone wants to take their angle at capitalising on the market. I can't think of quality user facing OSS that isn't aimed at developers or isn't trying to capitalise on the users somehow. Scratch that - blender is the only one I can think of - these guys are an amazing exception.
The only reason they aren't worse than Google is that they've been so shit at capturing the market share they don't get to make the same kind of moves, but Bing/Edge are not good alternatives for Google/Chrome.
I'm not one of those people that screams "M$ evil boooo", I actually use .NET day-to-day on a current project. But they have a really shit track record on Edge, it's the first browser I would avoid.
Microsoft is making great strides in open source and Linux. A decade ago, you wouldn't have believed MS would publish SQL Server for Linux, release something as great as VS Code, create Windows Subsystem for Linux (and Android soon), acquire npm and github and make them better rather than destroying them, etc.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975856
I gave up on Edge because it didn't support uBlock origin on Android, I view bundled add blockers as just another way for the browser to block competition while still serving you their own "respectful" ads.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-buy-now-pay-la...
Okay.
Unlike this project, which is very much from "internet randos"
such a well-known governance that keeps putting back telemetry and ads when users dont want them.
As for ads - where? I haven't seen any and I've been using Firefox on multiple platforms for many years.
Even if it did, we're again back at the point of "X is a spectrum". "evil" is a spectrum which, according to you, includes anonymous crash reports and then goes on to include serial killers and war criminals. Even then, anonymised usage data used to guide development is far less evil than collecting highly personal and identifying data and using it for targeted psychological manipulation to get you to buy things.
I get it, Mozilla isn't the poster child FLOSS org that we'd like it to be, but it's still orders of magnitude better than the competition.
No, crash reports are primarily data about the program, with very little if anything about you.
"Reflections on Trusting Trust": https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
And even if you go Full OpenBSD, you're still relying on some chip microcode and BIOS that you bought sight-unseen.
So, unless the Free Software Foundation staffs its own fab staffed by angels, the best we can do is minimize risk.
A more practical depth would be to bootstrap with GNU Mes, which is a source based bootstrapping path, that begins with a tiny scheme interpreter (~5000 LOC of simple C) and a C compiler written in scheme that are mutually self-hosting.
These tools can compile a slightly patched version of TinyCC that is self-hosting. Using this C compiler you can bootstrap a bunch of gnutools (glibc, binutils, gcc) and using these tools you can bootstrap a full Guix Linux distro.
stage 1: build from source using your existing compiler
stage 2: build again from source using the compiler you just built
stage 3: (just for checking): build a stage 3 compiler from the stage 2 compiler. Verify that it is byte-for-byte identical.
extra stages for the paranoid: repeat the process with a different starting compiler, as unrelated as possible. Again, verify that the output is bit-for-bit identical. You then know either that you're good, that the compiler reflects the source, or both starting compilers have the same devious hidden hack, perhaps courtesy of Ken Thompson himself.
GNU Mes achieves that paranoid step: once you verify with GNU Mes that you get the same bits, you don't really have to do this ever again, because you can certify that the compiler you get is reproducible from source and has no tricks.
How did you come to this conclusion when they stated that they'd rather use Firefox? Or are you saying Mozilla are the internet randos?
Sounds a little crazy not to trust them.
If you want chromium without Google there are several options such as Edge, Opera, Brave and probably a dozen more I've never heard of.
On the other hand, I simply don't trust internet randos, much less to install their binaries.
And it seems like a third option of Firefox w/ uBlock is less bad than either of the above.
/nerdsnipe
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:ungoogled_chrom...
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/discussions/14...
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-arc...
Worth it until the next "update", I think.
Despite that, it takes 4-8 hours to compile, due to two factors: 40,000+ separate targets, of which most are C++ files (famously slow to compile anyway).
And yes, 40,000+ separate targets is no exaggeration; ninja's first run claims about 18,000 targets, and after it finishes those, it generates a second ninja file that has to compile 23,000 targets.
I personally think it's worth it. Others may disagree, and I can't blame them. I have to run it overnight.
It is really hard to keep up-to-date with security patches if you need to compile every few days from source with that time..
Edit: Also 32GB RAM which matters
Edit: Also, 3900 is 3900X running on eco mode (same spec but half power). You might get a lot more performance by tuning BIOS settings.
I'll take a peek at the BIOS, but I'll also no good at doing such things.
I wonder how it compares to the build time of something with equivalent functionality, like firefox.
EDIT: Looks like popularity is on the rise [1]. Hopefully it will make it into the community repository.
[1] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages/ungoogled-chromium
For a project with frequent point releases, building Chromium via GitHub might require a monetary commitment.
edit: "integrated email client" Ok now I see why ;)
> Note that, of the three layers above, only the UI layer is closed-source. Roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open source coming from Chromium, 3% is open source coming from us, which leaves only 5% for our UI closed-source code
That changes the equation quite a bit.
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
I've used Vivaldi for years but now I'm getting split on it. I've got regressions that are just unacceptable (especially when it comes to video playback), but at the same time it comes with features I can't live without.
Essentials gives you the very basic stuff, classic gives you some extra features, and fully loaded gives you the built in mail client and all that other stuff.
[1] https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.Eloston.Ungoogle...
Here is the most recent build logs for x86_64 https://flathub.org/builds/#/builders/12/builds/8123 which I found from the GitHub green-tick status icon on the latest commit on https://github.com/flathub/com.github.Eloston.UngoogledChrom....
Personal experience, most of the source I download from GitHub either will straight refuse to compile in Visual Studio, or requires me tweaking a lot of the dependencies and stepping through the warnings and errors until it does.
"Ah, but don't use Visual Studio" you say. "Use XYZ-compiler-de-jour". Right, that's now in the 'too-hard/too-time-consuming' bucket, and I'll look for something else.
Those would be on a nix (linux/bsd/other) free source OS with distro specific binaries (or rolling their own and would be better off compiling it themselves anyways)
I don’t think this is true for macOS? the builds seem automated…
Tried building it myself and it takes 4 hours on my 32-core 5950x, and you still depend on someone actually porting a version bump because their patches need to be regenerated for every new chromium build.
I like the idea of it in principle; if someone donates some CI time and we get official CI builds, plus getting more active with picking up new builds it'll be a real contender. I'll stick with Firefox for now.
That said, if you're using cached builds via goma and have a nice fat pipe it can go quite fast without making your machine sweat much.
It's an absolutely massive code base. I wish I could explain why, but it is. No single part sticks out as bloat to me. I could never get CLion (among other tools) to index it properly.
Pfft.... 10 minutes to compile, no sweat, not even enough time to brew and drink a tea/coffee.
That's $8,000 for a refurbished computer with a processor that was launched in 2013.
damn, that's twice as many cores as a regular 5950x
Threads, vCores, etc. ... used to working in VMs not bare metal; but you got the point.
That seems excessively long? For me it only takes around 2.5 hours on a 8c/16t processor. This is with optimizations enabled, with plenty of free ram and building on SSD.
It's likely it'll be faster if I build on bare-metal on my box; spun up a VM because the build does all kinds of stuff (downloads binaries, spits up temporaries all over the place, etc.).
1. it's actually 24 physical cores, since azure counts hyperthreads as "vCPUs". still, that still seems slow compared to my own build times.
2. azure VMs have horrendous IO on the persistent data drives. You can probably get a small to medium speed improvement by moving your build to the D: drive.
This. If you want to benchmark builds on Azure, building on a tmpfs or ramfs will help mitigate disk IO latency, although tmpfs might swap.
Browsers are a window into the internet. Browsers should be simple enough to be implemented by a single person in a week.
I want the web to be re-constructed from scratch starting with the TCP/IP stack all the way to gifs with modern hindsight.
They are. It all depends on who defines what a "browser" is and what it can do.
The browser I use as a "daily driver" is a 1.3M static binary. It is 5.7M of C code, including graphics stuff I do not utilise. It compiles in under a minute on a low-end computer.
This browser allows me to "browse" hypertext. It displays HTML tables beautifully in textmode. I can download files. I can save HTML as formatted text. It supports FTP. The program has various settings for cache size, character set and so forth. I can script the browser using tmux.
This browser is all I really need.^1 I read HTML then decide if I want to download or save something. Simple. What else is there, really. When I want to run programs I do not do that using this browser. I have separate compilers and interpeters for that. When I want to listen to audio or watch video, I do not try to listen or watch using this browser. I have separate programs for that. And so on. I do not try to live inside a single pogram. In every case of a non HTML-reading/saving or www/ftp browsing task, the separate programs do a better job than the browser could. If this sounds something like the "UNIX principle" maybe that is not a coincidence.
Sure, we can take each of those individual programs and integrate them into a single program, and still call it a "browser" but why would anyone want to do that.^2 What is that concept in programming called "separation of concerns". Someone once called it "an ordering of one's thoughts". When people use browsers written by web advertising-supported organisations, then the "organisation of thoughts" is going to revolve around advertising (requisite tracking and personal data/metadata collection) and how to integrate it into the browser. When I use the text-only browser I choose, the ordering of thoughts is quite different. I see no advertising. Ever. I still consume the same amount of "content", maybe even more because this 1.3M browser is quite fast.
1. Major corporations operating on the web today, e.g., banks, can obviously force people to use certain browsers for business and important personal matters. For recreational web use, however, people can choose any browser.
2. The answer is not "For everyone's convenience and free enjoyment." That is why we have people trying to "un-google".
Also probably worth mentioning that I am not always necessarily using the browser to retrieve the HTML I want to read, nor to download binary files like audio, video, PDFs, and tarballs. I use other dedicated programs for that. The browser is used just as much "offline" as "online".
Connections from this browser go through an up-to-date localhost-bound forward proxy which handles any TLS verification. One of the obstacles to anyone writing a browser might be all the TLS stuff, getting it right and keeping it updated.
I used lynx in the late 90s. Honestly, as a 24/7 text-only browser user, I think lynx may be the worst of the text-only browsers. IMO, the fact that it is so often mentioned seems to suggest most folks who mention it are not using it much and/or are unfamiliar with the full range of alternatives.
Usually the only reason someone asks "what browser" is so they can make snide comments about it, diverting the discussion away from the original point, which is that there are other browsers like this and it is possible to write them. As such it is usually against better judgment to respond. Let's see what happens this time.
What I prefer is not the point. Every user is different. The point is that people have written other, smaller, simpler browsers, I am using one, and I am able to comment here and read every submitted website just like anyone else who is using Chromium or the like to do it.
I wasn't the person who asked, but I was also wondering and appreciate your answer for non-snide reasons. Especially in the context of the larger thread it's nice to hear what people use.
Far from the intent, just genuine curiosity. As you say, “most…are unfamiliar with the full range of alternatives”.
For something less radical, Gemini
Guix does not distribute Firefox and instead distributes GNU Icecat, which comes with the unremovable libreJS and an extension to make UPS's site work without JavaScript.
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
Uhh... thanks
It is ironically hosted for free on Microsoft's popular git hosting website.
It's easy, just don't use Google, Microsoft and Apple stuff.
The only reason I can think of even putting them in a nearby group is because of App Store restrictions, but you can still sideload your own code, and it doesn't apply to Macs at all.
Unless something has changed very recently, you can't sideload apps to your iOS device without getting a developer account from Apple and owning another apple OSX product from which to do the installation.
Not to mention being unable to use non-safari browsers on iOS and the scanning your images for illegal stuff they're planning on rolling out, and the extremely egregious anti right-to-repair lobbying they're doing.
Apple is not your friend. The less control we have over their device, the more money they can make from us.
They're rolling out a self-repair program soon, though this is certainly due to pressure from shareholders and the like.
The other points are completely valid but their sins pale in comparison to Google and Microsoft's.
I invite you to have a look at my favorite HN submissions about Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=fsflover.
Apple is an order of magnitude worse at "with the express intent of reducing our overall freedom".
I saw him give a talk once, and it was peppered with childish insults and calling companies and products he didn't like by "funny" alternative names.
It was impossible to take him seriously.
Is this litterally the best facts that gnu.org could come up with? Who put together this crap; a 12 year old or a guy who sells mattresses and is gonna launch his big lawsuit any day now.
Firefox for Android could use some improvements, when I switched from Chrome, the downgraded experience felt almost immediately, but you get used to that to the point you don't notice.
> Firefox Sync by default protects all your synced data so Mozilla can’t read it. We built Sync this way because we put user privacy first. In this post, we take a closer look at some of the technical design choices we made and why.
Some UX shortcuts or improvements could have been used as well (e.g. the "Sync" button for the tabs in other devices instead of syncing without asking, or... the weird zoom it does into a form field when I'm about to type in it).
(I wish someone would do this with Firefox too. I am tired of all the useless or meaningless services being added to Firefox - from pocket to monitor to even ads now.)
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
It seems it is mostly maintained within GNU Guix now (which has 91.3.0).
[^]: It comes with its own set of opinionated (but privacy-friendly) add-ons.
The GUIX package is more recent, but its description states:
> WARNING: IceCat 91 has not yet been released by the upstream IceCat project. This is a preview release, and does not currently meet the privacy-respecting standards of the IceCat project.
Is that really needed considering that about:config flags fixes all/most of the issues?
How do I even keep track of all this? What if my personal data has been uploaded to some service that I am not even aware is running in the background.
I'd like all that unnecessary code stripped from the browser. (It's like we are going backwards - we seem to have removed browser plugins in favour of bundling everything into a big bloat of a browser ... yeah, I know some of these are "special" firefox addons. The only thing that makes them "special" is that they are bundled into the browser by Mozilla, do not show up in the addons / extension page and cannot be removed like other user-installed addons.).
No amount of config flag fudging will fix that glaring design choice.
And make no mistake, it's a choice, not an error.
containers is a core feature of the browser. The addon (Firefox Multi-Account Containers) only adds some niceties like an addon button to start containers, and auto-assigning sites to containers. Without the addon, you can still manage containers by going to about:preferences#containers and open a tab in a given container by long pressing the new tab button.
Been using it on my work machine for a few months and I'm quite happy with it
plus
rm /usr/lib/firefox/browser/features/*.xpi
That's the scariest combination possible IMO. Regardless of the trustworthiness of the developer, it stacks incentives in a bad way. Even if LibreOffice is worse, at least it'll be around longer than one single developer.
I took a look at https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/tree/master/pa... and saw some surprising removals.
They don't enable the is_official_build flag which enables some security features (including CFI), and disables some debug stuff that a regular user shouldn't be using [1].
0: https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/
1: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/4F...
I'd much rather trust Firefox.
workarounds to install extensions were a major PITA till I found this
it's called telemetry ridden trash, that's shoved down users throats even for those that don't want it:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/15/22782802/microsoft-block...
The control panel doesn't provide a way to disable diagnostic telemetry, but it can be turned off via group policy. Then there's more options for MS service in "Privacy, search and services" to be disabled.
Edge is more like altgoogled than ungoogled.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-e...
I personally use Henry's chrlauncher: https://github.com/henrypp/chrlauncher
Some trust is needed but if given it automatically checks for builds on an automated build server and updates Chromium before launching it.
You can find some of the some of the patches here but there's more patches in the parent dir - https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/tree/master/pa...
There's a lot of telemetry, and a few other services such as time checking.
The features you're mentioning include the user syncing, translation, and DRM platforms (though you can add widevine to chromium, you cant add the others). Those are not the only things that call home to google.