Ungoogled Chrome

Burning Chrome

Ok, I am starting with a kind of Off-Topic section.

One of my favourite cyberpunk books is Burning Chrome by William Gibson.

Ungoogled Chromium

I remember few years ago I was having a pizza after a tech meetup in Milan and there was a guy specialized in Security. We were talking about trojans and stuff like that and he mentioned that the Chrome installer and updater service was full of interesting things. He said:

Have you ever tried to disassemble it? Also check what it does when it runs.

Let me clarify, I like Google and their products. In particular with Chrome they pushed forward the web platform. But I also apreciate people that do not trust, and instead verify and it is good to be aware and have an alternative.

I have a useful use case for having two different Chrome-based browsers. On the computer I am using for work, the default Chrome is managed by the company. So there are extensions and settings that I cannot change and anyway I do not want to mess with that. I know there are profiles but I prefer to have a completely separate browser for my stuff. So far I was using Chrome Canary but of course it is unstable and it happens (pretty rarely by the way) that it crashes.

Today I downloaded ungoogled-chromium which is

Google Chromium, sans integration with Google

Well, actually I downloaded ungoogled-chromium-macos which is the build for macOS.

Let’s see how it goes.

I am also writing this post to remember about its initial page: chrome://ungoogled-first-run. It contains also a link to the default settings, among others:

• “Block third-party cookies” is enabled by default
• “Continue running background apps when Chromium is closed” is disabled