ungoogled-chromium

ungoogled-chromium A lightweight approach to removing Google web service dependency Help is welcome! See the docs/contributing.md document for more information. Objectives In descending order of significance (i.e. most important objective first): ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services. ungoogled-chromium retains the default Chromium experience as closely as possible. Unlike other Chromium forks that have their own visions of a web browser, ungoogled-chromium is essentially a drop-in replacement for Chromium. ungoogled-chromium features tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency. However, almost all of these features must be manually activated or enabled. For more details, see Feature Overview. In scenarios where the objectives conflict, the objective of higher significance should take precedence. Content Overview Objectives Motivation and Philosophy Feature Overview Downloads Source Code FAQ Building Instructions Design Documentation Contributing, Reporting, Contacting Credits Related Projects License Motivation and Philosophy Without signing in to a Google Account, Chromium does pretty well in terms of security and privacy. However, Chromium still has some dependency on Google web services and binaries. In addition, Google designed Chromium to be easy and intuitive for users, which means they compromise on transparency and control of internal operations. ungoogled-chromium addresses these issues in the following ways: Remove all remaining background requests to any web services while building and running the browser Remove all code specific to Google web services Remove all uses of pre-made binaries from the source code, and replace them with user-provided alternatives when possible. Disable features that inhibit control and transparency, and add or modify features that promote them (these changes will almost always require manual activation or enabling). These features are implemented as configuration flags, patches, and custom scripts. For more details, consult the Design Documentation. Feature Overview This section overviews the features of ungoogled-chromium. For more detailed information, it is best to consult the source code. Contents of this section: Key Features Enhancing Features Borrowed Features Supported Platforms and Distributions Key Features These are the core features introduced by ungoogled-chromium. Disable functionality specific to Google domains (e.g. Google Host Detector, Google URL Tracker, Google Cloud Messaging, Google Hotwording, etc.) This includes disabling Safe Browsing. Consult the FAQ for the rationale. Block internal requests to Google at runtime. This feature is a fail-safe measure for the above, in case Google changes or introduces new components that our patches do not disable. This feature is implemented by replacing many Google web domains in the source code with non-existent alternatives ending in qjz9zk (known as domain substitution; see docs/design.md for details), then modifying Chromium to block its own requests with such domains. In other words, no connections are attempted to the qjz9zk domain. Strip binaries from the source code (known as binary pruning; see docs/design.md for details) Enhancing Features These are the non-essential features introduced by ungoogled-chromium. Add many new command-line switches and chrome://flags entries to configure new features (which are disabled by default). See docs/flags.md for the exhaustive list. Add Suggestions URL text field in the search engine editor (chrome://settings/searchEngines) for customizing search engine suggestions. Add more URL schemes allowed to save page schemes. Add Omnibox search provider "No Search" to allow disabling of searching Add a custom cross-platform build configuration and packaging wrapper for Chromium. It currently supports many Linux distributions, macOS, and Windows. (See docs/design.md for details on the system.) Force all pop-ups into tabs Disable automatic formatting of URLs in Omnibox (e.g. stripping http://, hiding certain parameters) Disable intranet redirect detector (extraneous DNS requests) This breaks captive portal detection, but captive portals still work. (Iridium Browser feature change) Prevent URLs with the trk: scheme from connecting to the Internet Also prevents any URLs with the top-level domain qjz9zk (as used in domain substitution) from attempting a connection. (Windows-specific) Do not set the Zone Identifier on downloaded files Borrowed Features In addition to the features introduced by ungoogled-chromium, ungoogled-chromium selectively borrows many features from the following projects (in approximate order of significance): Inox patchset Bromite Debian Iridium Browser Supported Platforms and Distributions See docs/platforms.md for a list of supported platforms. Other platforms are discussed and tracked in this repository's Issue Tracker. Learn more about using the Issue Tracker under the section Contributing, Reporting, Contacting. Downloads Automated or maintained builds ungoogled-chromium is available in the following software repositories: Arch: Available in the AUR, see instructions in ungoogled-chromium-archlinux Debian: Available in OBS, find your distribution specific instructions in the Installing section Ubuntu: Available in the XtraDeb PPA as ungoogled-chromium. Fedora: Available in COPR as wojnilowicz/ungoogled-chromium. Also available in RPM Fusion as chromium-browser-privacy (outdated). Gentoo: Available in ::pf4public overlay as ungoogled-chromium and ungoogled-chromium-bin ebuilds OpenMandriva includes ungoogled-chromium as its main browser. The chromium package includes all ungoogling patches. macOS: Available in Homebrew as ungoogled-chromium. Just run brew install --cask ungoogled-chromium. Chromium will appear in your /Applications directory. FreeBSD: Available in pkg as www/ungoogled-chromium. OpenBSD: Available in ports as www/ungoogled-chromium. openSUSE: