Python A Google Chromium variant for removing Google integration and enhancing privacy, control, and transparency
ungoogled-chromium
A Google Chromium variant for removing Google integration and enhancing privacy, control, and transparency
A number of features or background services communicate with Google servers despite the absence of an associated Google account or compiled-in Google API keys. Furthermore, the normal build process for Chromium involves running Google's own high-level commands that invoke many scripts and utilities, some of which download and use pre-built binaries provided by Google. Even the final build output includes some pre-built binaries. Fortunately, the source code is available for everything.
ungoogled-chromium is a set of configuration flags, patches, and custom scripts. These components altogether strive to accomplish the following:
Disable or remove offending services and features that communicate with Google or weaken privacy
Strip binaries from the source tree, and use those provided by the system or build them from source
Add, modify, or disable features that inhibit control and transparency (these changes are minor and do not have significant impacts on the general user experience)
Replace many web domains in the source code with non-existent alternatives ending in qjz9zk (known as domain substitution)
Strip binaries from the source code (known as source cleaning)
This includes all pre-built executables, shared libraries, and other forms of machine code. They are substituted with system or user-provided equivalents, or built from source.
However some data files (e.g. icudtl.dat for Unicode and Globalization support and *_page_model.bin that define page models for the DOM Distiller) are left in as they do not contain machine code and are needed for building.
Disable functionality specific to Google domains (e.g. Google Host Detector, Google URL Tracker, Google Cloud Messaging, Google Hotwording, etc.)
Add Omnibox search provider "No Search" to allow disabling of searching
Disable automatic formatting of URLs in Omnibox (e.g. stripping http://, hiding certain parameters)
Disable JavaScript dialog boxes from showing when a page closes (onbeforeunload events)
Bypasses the annoying dialog boxes that spawn when a page is being closed
Added menu item under "More tools" to clear the HTTP authentication cache on-demand
Force all pop-ups into tabs
Disable intranet redirect detector
Prevents unnecessary invalid DNS requests to the DNS server.
This breaks captive portal detection, but captive portals still work.
Add more URL schemes allowed for saving
Note that this generally works only for the MHTML option, since an MHTML page is generated from the rendered page and not the original cached page like the HTML option.
(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.
(Iridium and Inox feature change) Prevent pinging of IPv6 address when detecting the availability of IPv6
Support for building Debian and Ubuntu packages
Creates a separate package chrome-sandbox for the SUID sandbox
Not necessary to install if the kernel option unprivileged_userns_clone is enabled
Windows support with these changes:
Build wow_helper.exe from source instead of using the pre-built version
Build yasm.exe from source instead of using the pre-built version
Use user-provided building utilities instead of the ones bundled with Chromium (currently gperf and bison)
Do not set the Zone Identifier on downloaded files (which is a hassle to unset)
DISCLAIMER: Although it is the top priority to eliminate bugs and privacy-invading code, there will be those that slip by due to the fast-paced growth and evolution of the Chromium project.