Google Chrome Spinoff 'Iron' For Privacy Fanatics

Sonnet_XVIII writes "According to DownloadSquad, A German company SRWare has developed a Google Chrome Spin off called Iron aimed at people who are concerned or have questions about Google's policies for collecting usage data."

Re:Since when

[Bryansix]

Somebody confused their Television terms with their Technical terms.

Removing Unique User ID

[gurps_npc]

That alone makes it far superior to Chrome.

Alert me when it runs on Mac and/or Linux.

[greenguy]

I promise not to make "dupe" comments.

Re:Better name

[fizzding]

I dunno... "He's hiding something, clamp him in irons!" sounds about right to me.

Re:Fanatical

[MrNaz]

I'm increasingly starting to think that Slashdot editors are being underhandedly paid by Google to subtly ridicule anti-Google articles or sentiments. The wording of this summary makes it pretty blatantly obvious that the editor wants to make people who are suspicious of Google appear "fanatical", implying all the baggage that that word carries with it these days.

How is it fanatical to not want to send your data to a private corporation? Would it be fanatical if that corporation was Microsoft, Sony or Universal Studios?

I clear my cookies regularly. What Slashdot calls fanatical I call routine. So I guess that makes me a fanatic.

Re:Better name

[genghisjahn]

Wait til they get a load of my Transparent Aluminum Browser...it will alter the future!

Re:Fanatical

[redJag]

Fanatical people don't think of themselves as fanatical. Only the people that label them fanatical do..

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how German though babelfish reads a lot like corporate marketing speak.

Add the word leverage somewhere and you could have fooled me.

Re:Fanatical

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is determining what a reasonable person would call a fanatic. We all think we're reasonable, when honestly I find most of us (myself included) to be essentially unreasonable most of the time.

Calling someone fanatical these days is less about about extremism (for good or ill), and more about casting disrespect.

Their promises are as good as their source

[thisfred]

So they take the open source code, and redistribute it as an executable only. Of course completely legal under the BSD license, but wouldn't a privacy nut wonder why they give away the application for free but not the source code?

Re:You don't trust Google...

[neuromanc3r]

But you are expected to trust some obscure German software company. Right.)

You don't have to. You the source code is available for download. (And you could obviously monitor your traffic see if the browser phones home)

Re:Fanatical? use Opera

[AliasMarlowe]

I configured Opera to clear all cookies at the end of every session. Occasionally, I also clear them during a session.

In Epiphany, I regularly clean out all cookies manually. I do this before and after visiting any e-commerce or financial site, even if I don't conduct any transactions.

It's no more fanatical than using a condom.

Not Forked Up

[fm6]

Not at all. If you RTFCB [google.com] you'll know that a major goal of Chrome is to get its technologies and ideas incorporated into other Open Source projects. Actually, that seems to be pretty much the idea, at least at this stage in the product's lifecycle. The product itself is too limited and glitchy for any other purpose. It's not like a lot of people are going to adopt it as their day-to-day browser, not with its minimal feature set and rendering issues.

I suspect the Chrome team is actually quite pleased to see their software adopted by a "competing" project.

I'm no Google fanboy (though I guess I used to be). I'm often quite impatient with their endless betas, their crappy documentation, their buggy products, and their total indifference to the actual software marketplace. But for once I have to admit that they've created something really useful. It's just that the usefulness is not to the end user, it's to the OS developer community.

Re:Fanatical

[Sancho]

A reasonable person, or the average person? I don't think that the average person is reasonable.

The average person cares about having the newest car, the newest TV, a house they can't afford, etc. They want to keep up with the Joneses. They measure their own worth as relative to other people's possessions. Their own happiness depends upon being "better" than other people. That's not reasonable. That's why the American economy is in the mess that it's in. We're a society where the goal is to attain money any way you can. If you don't, you're a failure.

Reasonable? My ass.

Re:Fanatical

[RabidMonkey]

I won't pick points, but I don't think it's fair to roll 50% of the population into one bucket and assume things about them, right or wrong.

I'm sure you've never, in your entire life, done anything unreasonable, like wanting something because it looked cool, or sounded cool, or because you wanted to be the first kid on the block to have it, or because all of your friends had one.

All general statements are false.

Re:IRC log from Iron

[bmcage]

link please! I can make up your statement in 1..2..3, why would I believe this?

Re:IRC log from Iron

[Lord Bitman]

Chrome's been out for nearly a month now and I don't see any new release any time "soon".
With such a poor release, I expected new versions to come out the same day yet here we are, weeks later, and no sign that the problems are even on Google's radar.

If I pushed a product to millions of users by linking to it from the front page of the world's most popular website, saying it was "uncrashable", and then it turned out within minutes of real-world uses that no, it's just as easy to crash as any other browser (I've yet to see a "sad tab"), or any of the other major problems, etc- I'd work towards fixing them ASAP. Where is the new release? Where is the new alpha?

Google fucked up. Forking might wake them up. All good forks get merged in the end, anyway.

Re:IRC log from Iron

[zindorsky]

It's unfortunate that this guy decided to fork rather than submit bug fixes (or even file bugs). Several of the issues he identified are bugs, not intentional behavior in Chromium.

I disagree. While it may be true that the Iron developer(s) are mostly fixing bugs, the main reason for the fork still stands: there are those who like Google's technology, but don't want to share their data with Google.

Yes, they could just not enable those features in Chrome, but I understand the desire to have those features completely gone. What if you forget about one? What if an update (inadvertently or not) resets them to "send it all to Google"?

Perhaps the developers' are motivated only by the fame and glory. Perhaps this particular fork will fizzle out and be forgotten. But there will always be people who will want what it provides.