Chromium Browser Recommendations, Again

[van p]

I'm now looking for a new Chromium browser. First, I used UR browser, and it was abandoned. I then learned about Thorium on this forum, then it was abandoned. I would like to have something as independent/non-corporate as possible, but that's not doing me any good.

So, at this point, my list of possibles is DuckDuckGo, Ghostery, and Ulaa (from Zoho, an Indian technology company). Any thoughts?

[adoxa]

No thoughts, just another possibility: ungoogled-chromium.

[Moonchild]

I then learned about Thorium on this forum, then it was abandoned.

Really? That's curious, as I thought it had some momentum. I wonder what made them quit.

[Gemmaugr]

Thorium isn't abandoned, just delayed, as there's just a single dev working on it, between office hours (https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/i ... 2607351716).

Ghostery browser is abandoned: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery- ... scontinued.

Ulaa is a closed sourced Indian browser.

Your best bet is Brave: https://brave.com/

[van p]

Thanks for the responses so far.

Concerning U-C, the looseness of the organization is something of a concern to me. If I can go to https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-windows/releases/tag/139.0.7258.66-1.1 and click on (I guess) the 2nd link, I guess I'll give it a try. I'm not a computer expert, and it has to be pretty simple.

I guess I'm assuming that Thorium is abandoned. I haven't seen any kind of announcement, but I'm not sure there would be one, and it's last update was Feb. 13. I realize it's largely a one-man operation and he has a full-time job, but waiting that long for an update is ridiculous, and there' no guarantee it would be the latest version.

Gemmaugr, your link takes me to a post from Jan. 22, 3 weeks before the latest update--not sure what that's supposed to tell me. Your link to Ghostery says it was Firefox-based. I saw it in a list somewhere of Chromium browsers. At any rate, it's gone.

Concerning Ulaa, I did say it's from India, so I know that. Closed/Open isn't that big a deal to me. I'm not entitled to anything, so if Zoho can get something out of my using their browser, that's fine, as long as the spying is gone. I'll have to look into it further before making a final decision.

Finally, Brave. I've heard too much negativity about it and don't want to further embloat one of the big boys.

[andyprough]

Concerning U-C, the looseness of the organization is something of a concern to me. If I can go to https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-windows/releases/tag/139.0.7258.66-1.1 and click on (I guess) the 2nd link, I guess I'll give it a try. I'm not a computer expert, and it has to be pretty simple.

A good place for information is privacytests.org, an open-source initiative that subjects every version of certain web browsers to a very large suite of well over 100 automated tests related to privacy. Ungoogled-chromium usually ranks high in these test results.

I don't know how "loose their organization" is, but Ungoogled-chromium lists 90 developers as having contributed to the code on their github page. That is a substantial number of contributors for a project whose objective is to remove certain parts of Google's anti-privacy code from chromium. Seems like they can generally be trusted.

The real problem with any chromium-based browser is that it's based on chromium, and Google yanks the chromium project all over the place, including recently removing the ability of uBlock and similar extensions to effectively do their ad-blocking/tracker-blocking job.

[moonbat]

If you only want a Blink based browser as a backup for sites that won't run in Pale Moon - Ungoogled Chromium is the best bet as adoxa said above. Regular Chromium minus all the dependencies on Google services, it doesn't offer anything beyond the vanilla Chromium experience and so sites that are developed against Chrome only should work fine with it.

[van p]

Thanks again for the responses.

I'm a little confused. I've seen references to Blink but never paid much attention to it. My understanding was that Chromium was the underlying code that all Chrome-like browsers were built on. But apparently Chromium is built on Blink. My understanding also is that Chromium can also be used as a browser but would have only bare-bones browser capability. Can somebody clear all this up for me? Thanks.

[Moonchild]

I'm a little confused. I've seen references to Blink but never paid much attention to it.

Blink is the layout and rendering engine that underpins Chromium/Chrome and all of its variants (Including Brave, Edge, modern Opera, etc.). It's equivalent to the place Gecko has for Firefox, and Goanna for Pale Moon and Basilisk etc.

[van p]

Thanks, Moonchild.

Does anybody use Chromium as a browser?

Also, nobody has said anything about DDG browser; any thoughts there?

[Blacklab]

Never had any problems using Vivaldi as a 'back-up' Chromium-based, Blink-engined, browser. IMHO a much better UI than Brave and none of the dodgy crypto c*** and dubious politics in the mix either. Vivaldi is a fully featured and developed browser so no technical knowledge required.

Vivaldi's Privacy T&Cs are ok... but worth a read to understand what is 'phoned home'... very little, anonymized, and nothing of concern AFAICS.

Vivaldi's UI is definitely of the 'kitchen sink' variety in that pretty much every layout option you ever thought of is available from the huge 'Settings' menu... so can be somewhat daunting to setup first time with an overwhelming list of tab styles and other appearance/feature choices.

Vivaldi is still allowing the full MV2 version of uBlock Origin (uBO) to work... however, unsure when MV2 support will end in Vivaldi as underlying Chromium codebase updates rattle through every month. Expect to have to switch to the MV3 compliant uBO-Lite (uBOL) version idc. Vivaldi does have a built-in Adblocker feature to which you can add additional filter lists but not comparable to uBO.

Can also modify Vivaldi's UI with 'userChrome.css' if that floats your boat.

[Gemmaugr]

Never had any problems using Vivaldi as a 'back-up' Chromium-based, Blink-engined, browser. IMHO a much better UI than Brave and none of the dodgy crypto c*** and dubious politics in the mix either. Vivaldi is a fully featured and developed browser so no technical knowledge required.

Vivaldi's Privacy T&Cs are ok... but worth a read to understand what is 'phoned home'... very little, anonymized, and nothing of concern AFAICS.

I'd heavily disagree here.

"When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your device. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message. We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last octet of the IP address from your Vivaldi client then we store the resolved approximate location after using a local geoip lookup."

A Closed Source browser assigning a unique ID and phoning home hardware (and IP) data every 24/7 is a bit.... eeeeh.

Also, Brave's crypto is opt-in, their Shields will work as MV2's uBO, and everyone's politics is different. You don't want to get me started on Mozilla's...

[van p]

First, andyprough,thanks for the info on privacytests.org. Can't help but notice that Pale Moon doesn't render the site properly. I assume Pale Moon can't be modified to fix this.

I've taken a close-enough look at u-c to arrive at this conclusion: A lot of improvements over Chrome require me to use a command-line function to enable these improvements, and that assumes I know that these improvements exist and what command-line functions to perform to enable these improvements. Based on that I'm rejecting u-c. If I'm wrong or at least the process is not as burdensome as I think it is, please let me know.

Also, on github it says, "ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services." This implies to me that u-c isn't a full-fledged browser built on Chromium, it IS Chromium, without whatever nonsense Google put into it, and without whatever bells and whistles most people would like to have, which seems to be what moonbat is saying above. Again, if this isn't correct or overstates the situation, somebody please let me know.

Still hoping somebody will give me feedback on DDG. As of now, I'll be looking more closely at DDG and Ulaa. Thanks for any assistance that can be provided to shorten my research.

[van p]

Downloaded DDG. Its 'delete browsing data' is pretty much all or nothing; I need more flexibility than that. Also, its Settings are pretty bare bones compared to other Chromium browsers. So, it's gone.

Downloaded Ulaa (OO-luh). It's a lot like Thorium, but its 'delete browsing data' function is a problem. When I change the default options, they don't stay changed. I'm not gonna go in there and do all those clicks every time I close the browser. There are a couple other minor issues that wouldn't keep me from using the thing. I sent them an email about the big problem. Not sure how long I'm willing to wait for an answer. If they don't fix this, then I'll just stick with Thorium as long as it's usable. Ulaa doesn't seem to offer anything of substance beyond Thorium except that it's updated once a month. That's a good thing, of course, but that 'delete data' thing has to be fixed.

Still accepting any comments/suggestions anybody wants to make.

[RealityRipple]

Just curious, exactly what "improvements over Chrome" in u-c are you referring to? The only two command-line parameters I use when I have to load up chromium are "--disable-features=GlobalMediaControls" to get rid of the casting interface and "--no-default-browser-check".

[van p]

Forgot to mention that DDG is still Beta--had no idea.

Concerning "improvements over Chrome," from u-c itself: "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." This sounds to me like I have to do a lot of command-line stuff to get the full benefits of u-c. I don't understand this stuff; I did say, "If I'm wrong or at least the process is not as burdensome as I think it is, please let me know." So, if I can get most of the benefits of u-c by just downloading and going through the Settings as I normally would, I guess I'll give it a shot. The problem will be if I have to do command-line stuff to get meaningful benefit from that browser. That's all I'm saying.

Thanks, Reality Ripple, for the response.

EDIT: Also, from this site https://ungoogled-software.github.io/about/ we get "It also features some tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency (almost all of which require manual activation or enabling)." And "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)." If this requires mostly command-line stuff, I'm gone. If this is done in the Settings, that I can do.

EDIT2: I installed u-c. The Settings process was fairly standard. I used the info on Chrome://ungoogled-first-run to deal with the flags; no command-line stuff. Don't think I changed anything. I guess everything is OK except I have 2 security-related extensions that I use in the other browsers that I want to get into u-c. I'll have to decide what to do about that. If Thorium quickly comes up with an update and promises to do better in the future, or Ulaa comes up with a quick fix for my complaint, I guess I would choose one of those. For now, when I get time, I'll look into the extension thing on u-c.

[van p]

The deed is done.

Other than DDG, already mentioned, I tried u-c, Ulaa, and Supermium. I had problems/disappointments with all of them. I emailed Thorium's developer and heard nothing. Same with Ulaa. Tried to commo with Supermium, but its hCaptcha messaging process doesn't seem to work (tried with several browsers). Thorium is perfect as long as it's maintained. All the others were at least minimally deficient in some way. If in the future I come across some reason to believe something might have changed, I'll look into it. As of now, I'm sticking with Thorium until it implodes, explodes, or melts down. All the others I uninstalled.

Thanks to everybody who responded.

[andyprough]

Thorium is perfect as long as it's maintained. All the others were at least minimally deficient in some way. If in the future I come across some reason to believe something might have changed, I'll look into it. As of now, I'm sticking with Thorium until it implodes, explodes, or melts down. All the others I uninstalled.

Sounds good, let us know how it's going, maybe give us an update after a couple months of using it. Could be that Thorium is one that more of us should be trying out.

[van p]

Sounds good, let us know how it's going, maybe give us an update after a couple months of using it. Could be that Thorium is one that more of us should be trying out.

Well, again, I've been using Thorium I guess about a year with no problems. The problem now is that it hasn't been updated in more than 6 months, and the developer is MIA, not responding to comments/questions on github. And not responding to my email requesting an explanation about the future of Thorium. Again, all the alternatives I tried had some kind of deficiency/shortcoming that irked me, so I'll keep using Thorium for the foreseeable future.

[UCyborg]

I can only tolerate Edge, because:



Chromium's default font rendering hurts my eyes and causes headache.