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Because people are misinformed. Especially paranoids, apparently.

Iron is a known scam. If there is a reason to use Iron, it is not for its privacy related offerings. You're better off just using Chromium.

I particular like the fact that the guy who forked Chrome into Iron, only did so to generate loads of traffic to his home page and hence get a bit more adsense revenue in. http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html

Iron is a known scam. If there is a reason to use Iron, it is not for its privacy related offerings. You're better off just using Chromium.

Is Iron a Scam? Yes

There is no difference. The only useful thing SRWare Iron makes is increasing the number of website thumbnails.

http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

I used to like Iron a lot too (the portable version) until in a recent Slashdot comment somebody pointed to a debunking of it at http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam. I must admit at first I was a bit disappointed, but then I said to myself "welcome to the wonderful world of FOSS".

Iron runs an out-of-date build with known vulnerabilities, hasn't posted their source changes in a long time, and is widely accepted to be a scam. By all means make your own decisions on browsers, but I think you're doing more harm than good with Iron. And if all you want to is to run Chrome disconnected entirely from Google, the instructions are here.

Perhaps not: http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

Iron is for dumb paranoid fuckers who don't actually care about their own security

Is Iron a Scam? Yes

The article title appears to be too harsh, but basically somebody compared the Iron source code to the Chromium source code and found that the only real changes were to disable 3 items that were already user-configurable within Chromium.

Here's another article that suggests that the actual reason for the Iron fork was just to make money (using Google ads on their website) by taking advantage of peoples' fears about Google: The story of Iron

So if you really are worried about Google, you should also worry about the misinformation being spread by the creators of Iron. If you want to have access to the full source, I suggest installing Chromium instead of Iron.

SRWare Iron is a joke; go with a Chromium build if you're looking for a completely open source version of Chrome, then disable the four options SRWare codes out entirely. They'll remain persistently disabled between installs (I just use the builds of Chromium provided by Google and update occasionally).

The WebRequest API (experimental) is promising but at this time it doesn't touch what Firefox has; Chrome/Chromium simply do not permit extensions the same level of access.

There are only a few real world browsing scenarios that I have encountered with Chrome (vs. FF7) that Chrome is faster, and sometimes I have encountered the inverse. However it depends on the machine; on slower machines, Chrome is a lot faster, and Opera is great for older PCs because it'll run circles around both.

So, you use a copy of chromium that doesn't share it's source? odd...

suuuuuuuuuuuuuure

It's the same browser as Chromium with a few options being hardcoded instead of being user-selectable. http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

It's been known for a while that SRWare Iron is a scam.

SRWare Iron is basically a scam. The changes they made have never been privacy issues in the first place. Maybe it's different since then, but here's what it looked like back in version 4

Iron is a joke. It's nothing more than a rebranded Chromium that some guy thought he could get rich off of.

Chromium Notes: The story of Iron
Is Iron a Scam? Yes

While Iron does not provide extra privacy compared to Chromium, it does disable some configurable Chromium features that could share information with third parties.

Iron is supposedly a scam according to some web sites: http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.

For what it's worth, I can confirm the logs that evmar posted. They begin at September 17, 2008, 3:00:30 PM EST in my logs for #chromium-dev on freenode. I idled in that channel since shortly after the Chromium release was announced. I'm not a Google employee or Chrome/Chromium developer, but I have used Chrome as my browser for over a year (IIRC).

Salient quotes from the log:

• <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 is a complete scam, avoid it. If you're worried about privacy, use Chromium compiled by your distro (don't want MS or Apple to get info about you, right?) and turn off everything that sends data to Google.

Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.

The Iron that doesn't actually change anything, just rebrands the browser and reaps ad revenue?

http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

While I have an instant dislike for the author of the article, because he appears to be a massive douche, that's the only independent audit of Iron's source I could find.