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."

Since when

[szo]

we started to call forks a "spin off"?

Re:Fanatical

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Bullshit. In the modern surveillance society, you'd have to be stupid to not take every precaution you reasonably can.

IRC log from Iron

[Anonymous Coward]

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. It's supposed to be the case that anything that talks to a third-party server is controllable via preferences and options. He ran into a few that slipped through and decided to do a fork for self-publicity and $$ rather than trying to help the project. I see no problem with having forks in general, but this one seems unnecessary at this point.

Here's an excerpt from an IRC log on chromium-dev from a week ago when people asked him why he wasn't filing bugs or patches:

Iron: because a fork will bring a lot of publicity to my person and my homepage
Iron: that means: a lot of money too ;)
Iron: i dont take money for my fork
Iron: but i have adsense on my page ;)
Iron: a lot of visitor -> a lot of clicka > a lot of money ;)
Iron: we are here in germany
Iron: the press will love my fork
Iron: i talked to much journalists already
Iron: to remove all things in source talking to google ;)
Iron: nobody here trusts google
Iron: the german people say: google is very evil

Re:Removing Unique User ID

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Chrome installs into the user's profile folder, not in the Program Files folder. Each user has his own installation, thus each user has a unique ID. If Chrome is uninstalled and reinstalled later, the previous ID persists.

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

[Al Dimond]

Most browser vulnerabilities aren't as simple as vulnerabilities in common network server or client code. I think it would be pretty damn hard to declare a browser secure by examining its code.