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Chromium
| Chromium | |
 | |
| Type | Free |
| Layout engine | Blink |
| Website | https://www.chromium.org/Home/ |
Chromium is a free and open source Web browser developed by Google and other contributors. It is known for its ubiquitous JavaScript engine, excessive memory usage, multi-process security model, and rapid development cycle.
When it was initially released, Chromium was vastly superior to other major browsers in terms of performance, but this advantage gradually diminished in the years following its release as the other browsers caught up. Today, Chromium's major draw is being in absolutely everything.
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a proprietary sister project of Chromium developed by Google.
In addition to Chromium's usual set of features, it includes proprietary blobs full of DRM and advertising bloat. Because of this, it is often accused of being a botnet by the more security-conscious participants on /g/, for good reason.
Official release channels
- Stable is targeted at most home and office users
- Beta, for those who want to try new features early.
- Canary is the bleeding-edge channel, intended for web developers. Instability and vulnerabilities are to be expected.
Tracking details
Google Chrome's user tracking capabilities include, but are not necessarily limited to the following:
- Installation: upon installation, Google Chrome sends a randomly generated token from the installer back to Google. This is used to measure the success rate of Chrome installations. This feature is non-optional.
- RLZ identifier: an encoded string that, according to Google, contains non-identifying bits of information about where Chrome was downloaded from and when it was installed. It is transmitted to Google upon the first launch, first use of the address bar, and first Google search query. The collected information is used to measure the success of promotional campaigns. This feature is non-optional, but Google does provide the necessary source code to decode the string.
- ClientID: a unique identifier coupled with user preferences, logs of usages metrics, and crashes. This feature is optional and disabled by default.
- OmniBox predictions: any text typed into the address bar is sent to Google. This feature is optional, but enabled by default.
- Page-not-found web service: upon receiving a server not found response, the query typed into the address bar is sent to Google. This feature is optional, but enabled by default.
- Spell-checking web service: any text typed is transmitted to Google. This feature is optional and disabled by default.
- Google update: data concerning the user's Chrome usage, operating system details, and Chrome version is transmitted to Google periodically. This feature is non-optional.
Notable forks
Thorium
Thorium is a fork developed with speed in mind. It sees performance improvements of 8%-38% over stock Chromium.
Ungoogled Chromium
ungoogled-chromium is a fork built with privacy as a top priority, with Google's privacy invading aspects stripped out of the browser. It's free and open source, leveraging some patch sets from the the Iridium browser. The only real drawback is that you are limited to gimped Manifest V3 extensions, and thus can only install the "lite" version of uBlock Origin.
Recommended extensions
Adblocking, privacy, and security
uBlock Origin Lite
uBlock Origin Lite is a lightweight and low-resource adblocker. Has many filter lists built in, with EasyList, Peter Lowe’s Ad server list, EasyPrivacy, and Malware domains enabled by default. It is, as the name implies, not as capable as the full version, and as such does not include cosmetic filtering or scriptlet injection. This should be used as your last line of defense against online advertisements. The full fat version of uBlock Origin, however. is still available for Firefox and it's derivatives.
Decentraleyes
Decentraleyes prevents a lot of requests from reaching content delivery networks like Google Hosted Libraries, and serves local files to keep sites from breaking. Complements your existing content blockers and helps to prevent fingerprinting.
ClearURLs
ClearURLs is an extension that automatically removes tracking elements from URLs to help protect your privacy when interacting with the botnet.
Usability
Dark Reader
Dark Reader allows the user to apply an automatically generated dark theme to any website. Your mileage may vary.
Stylus
Stylus allows the user to apply custom visual styles to Websites, internal browser pages, and more.
Violentmonkey
Violentmonkey adds a proper user script manager to Chromium. While it is certainly possible to install user scripts as Chromium extensions without this extension, it makes managing them much more convenient.
Tweaks and Fixes
Suspending unneeded tabs
If you have tabs sitting around that you don't really actively need, you can unload them using Memory Saver mode
Installing extensions
If you cannot install extensions with your version of Chromium, install this extension