Google Chrome, is a very successful browser that requires no introduction, no doubt. Google Chrome is based on Chromium. For the untrained eye, the two might seem the same, but things couldn’t be further away from the “truth.”
Google Chrome is based on Chromium, and both Google Chrome and Chromium are developed by Google. There are however a lot of differences.
For starters, Chromium is fully open-source, meaning anyone can use and modify the code according to their needs and wants (examples include projects like Vivaldi, Brave, and even Microsoft Edge). The same cannot be said about Google Chrome which has a proprietary code, meaning it’s a proprietary browser.
The thing that can become confusing is that (at least I have found it to be this way) some users tend to think of Chromium as an open-source browser that doesn’t have Google-related components bundled within. This is, of course, false.
I won’t go into details (because there’s a lot to say), but if you want a pure Chromium experience and you want to be sure that nothing Google-related is in your browser, then ungoogled-chromium is the way to go.
ungoogled-chromium is a free and open-source varianta of the Chromium web browser. One of the main appeals of this particular project/browser is that it totally removes all Google-specific web services.
How does it achieve this? It’s simple: it uses a series of patches applied to the Chromium codebased during the compilation process. In many ways, ungoogled-chromium is the “purest” form of Chromium.
What’s even more impressive is that ungoogled-chromium also features a lot of changes (in comparison to Chromium) to enhance all aspects of privacy, transparency, and user control over the data.
To be more precise, ungoogled-chromium removes all remaining background requests to any web service (both while building and running the browser).
All code specific to Google-related web services is removed. For instance, ungoogled-chromium disables Safe Browsing, as well as all functionality specific to Google domains such as Host Detector, URL Tracker, Cloud Messaging, and Hotwording (and many others).
As a fail-safe measure, the developers of this project have also ensured that the browser blocks internal requests to Google at runtime. This measure is added by replacing lots of Google web domains in the source code with “fake” or non-existing alternatives (think of domain substitution).
The project also removes all uses of pre-made binaries from the source code, and replaces them with user-provided alternatives (when that’s possible), something called “binary pruning.”
Even though the so-called enhancements are considered “non-essential” features by the developers, they’re still worth knowing. Because the list is quite hefty, I recommend that users take a quick look at the Feature Overview section available on the GitHub repo page.
Last but not least, it’s impressive to me that ungoogled-chromium (selectively) borrows some features from other projects such as Inox patchset, Bromite, Debian, and Iridium Browser.
As one can imagine, with a project the size of ungoogled-chromium, there’s a lot to touch upon. I would also like to recommend a quick read of the FAQ section, as it might help shed some much-needed light on this amazing project.
I insist upon this section because ungoogled-chromium is not exactly an install-it-and-forget-about-it app, as some features will require some user intervention to be fully activated.
Even though I fully admire this project, choosing between Google Chrome, Chromium, and ungoogled-chromium is not a straightforward decision.
Google Chrome is the norm, the daddy, the big dog, and it’s everywhere, and for good reason. On the other hand (even though I would argue that they’re not direct competitors), ungoogled-chromium is the “underdog,” the hero of privacy-aware users.
Even though the existence of ungoogled-chromium doesn’t detract from the value of Chromium (which is a very awesome project in its own right, and the basis of other just as awesome projects), I would still say that ungoogled-chromium is the superior privacy solution for browsing.
