Comment by tapoxi

6 years ago

Or just use Ungoogled Chromium, and get the performance advantage of Chrome without the tracking.

Is there actually still a performance advantage these days? Would be curious to see some benchmarks.

I will say that Gmail/Hangouts feels faster in Chrome but that's obviously not a fair comparison.

Is there definitive proof that all of the Google stuff is really out of a naked Chromium install? I remember reading stuff about it being impossible to wholly untangle Google's stuff from it.

  • This is my question as well. Additionally, I've wondered if there are non-explicit behaviors of the browser that are used for fingerprinting.

    • https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/do...

      "those binaries that cannot be removed do not contain machine code."

      I'm not sure what's meant by them not containing machine code, but it does seem like some of the binary blobs are retained that can't be built from source or substituted.

      Honestly, I'd just switch to Firefox to be safe, though Ungoogled-Chromium does automatically set a lot of sane pro-privacy defaults that you'd have to manually change in Chromium/Firefox.

Is there a quick summary of what major site/features that will be unavailable in Chromium vs. Chrome? I assume, for example, that 'netflix' will be prominently on that list. Thanks.

  • I use Chromium; you can still Netflix. It does, however, require installation of "WideVine", which is an opaque, closed, binary blob. (But you're getting that with Chrome, too, I believe.)

    You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the same mechanism.

    • >You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the same mechanism.

      It's somewhat better on Firefox because they run the binary blobs in a sandbox.