ungoogled-chromium

ungoogled-chromium

Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration and enhancing privacy, control, and transparency

Motivation and Description

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)

ungoogled-chromium should not be considered a fork of Chromium. The main reason for this is that a fork is associated with more significant deviations from the Chromium, such as branding, configuration formats, file locations, and other interface changes. ungoogled-chromium will not modify the Chromium browser outside of the project's goals.

Since these goals and requirements are not precise, unclear situations are discussed and decided on a case-by-case basis.

ungoogled-chromium is looking for contributors. See the Contributing, Reporting, Contacting section for more information.

Table of Contents

• Features
  • Supported platforms and distributions
• Download pre-built packages
• Getting the source code
• Frequently-asked questions
• Design and implementation
• Building
• Contributing, Reporting, Contacting
  • Pull request guidelines
• Credits
• License

Features

This list is not exhaustive. For more details, consult the source code.

ungoogled-chromium borrows features from the following:

• Debian
• Inox patchset
• Iridium Browser

Most of the additional features are as follows:

• 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 a few data files 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)
• Added menu item under "More tools" to clear the HTTP authentication cache on-demand
• Force all pop-ups into tabs
• Disable Safe Browsing
  • See the FAQ
• Disable WebRTC (will be configurable in the future #179)
• Disable intranet redirect detector (extraneous DNS requests)
  • This breaks captive portal detection, but captive portals still work.
• Add more URL schemes allowed for saving
• (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 Linux packages for multiple distributions (work in progress)
• Windows support
  • Does not set the Zone Identifier on downloaded files

NOTE: 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.

Supported platforms and distributions

• Linux
• Windows
• macOS

Download pre-built packages

Contributor binaries

All downloads

The release versioning scheme follows that of the tags. See the next section for more details.

Alternative installation methods

macOS cask: Available as eloston-chromium

Getting the source code

Users are encouraged to use one of the tags. The master branch is not guaranteed to be in a working state.

Tags are versioned in the following format: {chromium_version}-{release_revision} where

• chromium_version is the version of Chromium used in x.x.x.x format, and
• release_revision is a number indicating the version of ungoogled-chromium for the corresponding Chromium version.

Frequently-asked questions

See FAQ.md

Design and implementation

See DESIGN.md

Building

See BUILDING.md

Contributing, Reporting, Contacting

Use the Issue Tracker for problems, suggestions, and questions. There is also a Gitter chat room for those who want a real-time discussion.

Contributions of many kinds are welcome! For pull requests, please read the guidelines below first. Additionally, issues marked with the help wanted tag are changes that needs discussion or assistance.

Pull request guidelines

• Minor changes, such as bug fixes, documentation fixes, or small feature additions, will generally not need prior approval.
• More significant changes should be proposed through an issue first, where it can be discussed publically and then approved.
• When in doubt, create an issue first.

Credits

Iridium Browser

Inox patchset

Debian

The Chromium Project

License

GPLv3. See LICENSE