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Comment by rpearl | Hacker News Reader

Chrome, or Chromium? One is open source, one really isn't. The set of things that Chrome does is certainly based on Chromium, but Google certainly has the freedom to add some very useful tracking behavior... if they want to.

On one, we have source. On the other, we just have the quote "We go out of our way to avoid doing that, actually." What other evidence?

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Given that I'm responding to "I'm pretty sure Chrome send URLs to Google at least for indexing purposes." let's first agree that there's been no evidence provided that I can respond to. :)

I mean both Chrome and Chromium. The source is there, we develop in the open, and I'm not sure what additional evidence I can provide to you to prove a negative. Wireshark?

Well the source for Chrome is not open (edit: correction acknowledged - I thought only Chromium was open), though if you are a Chrome developer confidently saying this is impossible then I would give merit to that. My experiences were non-scientific but still gave me enough suspicious to right this. I may try a more rigorous/careful/documented experiment sometime in the future.

The source to Chrome is definitely open and you can compile an effectively identical version yourself (minus the branding). There are some closed source plugins (eg. PDF and Flash) that are shipped as dynamic libraries. However, you could disable them (via about:plugins) or simply delete the corresponding binaries from a Chrome distribution and everything remaining would be open source.

When you say "effectively identical" do you mean all the preference defaults, all the Google service connection points, etc? Could I do a build from the Chrome source and get a hash match with the release build from Google?

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