In Operation
Here’s an image of the web browser in action.
The software is essentially a collection of patches applied to Chromium during the compilation process. This means that it’s a drop-in replacement for Chromium as opposed to other forks.
What do the patches provide? At one level they remove functionality and introduce blocking elements.
- Disables functionality that needs Google domains, such as Google Safe Browsing, Google Host Detector, Google URL Tracker, Google Cloud Messaging, and Google Hotwording.
- Blocks internal requests to Google at runtime.
- Removes binary blobs from the Chromium source code and replaces them with custom alternatives.
- Disables extraneous DNS requests.
But ungoogled-chromium is not just about disabling functionality that ties you to Google’s telemetry. The project also adds features including lots of command-line switches which makes the web browser much more configurable than Chromium. The project has also added suggestions URL text field, more URL schemes, as well as an Omnibox search provider “No Search”.
Summary
Chromium has a very good reputation. It’s secure, hardened, and sandboxed. ungoogled-chromium builds on this reputation by offering a lightweight approach to removing the Google web service dependency. Besides the privacy and transparency benefits, the project has also added some useful features.
ungoogled-chromium has received more than 18K GitHub stars.
Website: github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Support:
Developer: The ungoogled-chromium Authors / The Chromium Authors
License: BSD 3-Clause License
ungoogled-chromium’s patches are written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary