Thursday, September 25, 2008

Iron Aims to Be Chrome With Better Privacy

Chromium is the name of the open source code base of Google Chrome, meaning everyone with the right skills can tinker with the code and produce new browser offsprings. The German Iron is one such offspring. According to German Golem (one of the most popular tech news here after Heise.de) as well as the software’s maker SRWare, this browser removes different kinds of Chrome features which raised privacy concerns with some people. Among the list of changes:

• there won’t be a unique number delivered with the installation
• there won’t be any auto-suggest functionality available in the address bar, so no such data will be sent to Google
• program crashes won’t be reported to Google
• there won’t be any alternate error messages when you enter a wrong URL
• Iron won’t remember when it was installed; the timestamp feature available in Chrome was deactivated
• there’s no more Google Updater running in the background

Whether or not all features which have been removed were truly privacy critical, and whether by removing above features Iron truly improves privacy, is another issue (e.g. by removing the updater software, it’s theoretically possible that a browser vulnerability – potentially including privacy vulnerabilities – won’t be fixed as timely). Also, installing any kind of software means you need to trust the publisher – in this case, SRWare.

In other Chrome news, some of the first Chrome-related Cease & Desist style letters are being sent out by Google lawyers.

[Thanks Mathias Schindler and Troy!]

Iron Aims to Be Chrome Wi ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (9)

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