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Chromium-Based Spinoffs Worth Trying
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp takes an in-depth look at six Chromium-based spinoffs that bring privacy, security, social networking, and other interesting twists to Google's Chrome browser. 'When is it worth ditching Chrome for a Chromium-based remix? Some of the spinoffs are little better than novelties. Some have good ideas implemented in an iffy way. But a few point toward some genuinely new directions for both Chrome and other browsers.'"
The good thing about Chrome is that it doesn't have all that extra crap, unless you choose specific extensions. Browsers with novelties and whimsical features in some poor effort to differentiate themselves are so 2001.
Shouldn't you be endorsing Safari instead, Mr. Takei?
p.s. you gotta purty deep voice for an Asian gay guy.
If it was a botnet, don't you think the people who work on the forks would know?
6 more goofy names that mean nothing (internet explorer? ok, Netscape Navigator? ok, SRWare Iron, Comodo Dragon, Iceweasel? wtf)
ps here is the print version, so you dont have to wade through 6 ad infested pages
http://www.infoworld.com/print/184923
They must've learned to count from Monte Python.
One, two, FIVE!
of various hodge podge pieces of source code all mashed together in an uncompilable, mountainous sploodge vomit of bizarre perversions of the once innocent C language
The real reason to use SRWare Iron is so you can use Fanboy's adblock.ini file to stop the browser from loading ads. Then you can combine that with an additional element hider.
... now we can have the same security bugs as Chrome/Chromium but without any timely fixes!
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Well, this is as good a place to put this as any. Both of you Windows Phone users need to stay away from the Chrome browser for Windows Phone. It's a scam.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Who cares? It's as bad as a Linux desktop. At the end of the day, what works for you works for you. Add in all the goofy names and no average user will ever even know about them. Obscurity by obscurity.
"On the Internet, nobody can hear you being subtle." -Linus Torvalds
I like how a post that points out that SRWare Iron is a scam with zero additional privacy is reduced to an "odd anecdote" by the article.
Say what you want about Google not respecting your privacy, but at least you know they won't steal your credit card information.
The interface is what ruins Chrome, how come no one bothers to fix it? A good interface is consistent, internally and externally: the app must belong with the operating system around it. Chrome is alien in any system, it does not have the same window borders, menu bar, or anything else as every other app. That's tolerable from a tiny indie team, like jDownloader, but from a megacorporation like Google this is simply cringeworthy.
Circumcision is child abuse.
... this was an upbeat science article about the benefits of a new vitamin supplement. Oh well.
InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp takes an in-depth look at six Chromium-based spinoffs that bring privacy
I read that as "piracy". Too much news on the same topic, I suppose.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Do any of them let you map forward-slash to searching within the page?
The one thing that keeps me from switching to Chrome is the lack of customization. With Firefox I have the wonderful about:config, but Chrome has no such feature. Even basic settings like moving where the tabs are or fine-grained privacy settings are missing from Chrome and most Chrome derived browsers.
Until Firefox somehow becomes totally unusable or Chrome actually lets me change basic settings, I'm sticking with Firefox.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I would love Chrome if it had a status bar instead of a status popup that covers page elements and a URL bar that either shows the http or doesn't include it when you copy and paste the URL (what kind of moronic...).
So, basically a browser that doesn't go out of its way to annoy me. Is there a version of Chrome like THAT?
Page 3 reviews Comodo Dragon. What it doesn't mention is that if an HTTPS site uses a certificate that's domain validated, Dragon raises a warning "that the organization operating it may not have undergone trusted third-party validation that it is a legitimate business." Might this just be a way to threaten small-time webmasters, especially those who only started offering HTTPS to join EFF's HTTPS Everywhere initiative or to offer user accounts without running the risk of getting Firesheeped, into buying pricier EV certificates?
The days of the browser or the two browsers are over.
Everyone can crap out a browser based on one of plenty different engines.
People here who think they are arguing about more than just their personal taste in browsers should get a life.
It's probably not some nefarious plot to sell certs, HTTPS is a good thing, but I agree that raising a warning for domain validated sites is a mistake. Any site that I trust enough to visit, I trust enough to use their certs.
Or, if you are going to start requiring user approval, do it for every site, instead of having a huge list of "legitamate businesses" who pay to be trusted by the browser automatically. I have never really understood why a trusted third-party is necessary.
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.
Microsoft has matured with its browser from the medieval times of IE5.
Um, while that's undeniable, it's only true as a comparison with past IE browsers.
I have to use IE9 at work and can testify that it still stalls, glitches and balks, and is generally irritating to use. It realy doesn't compare to any modern browser.
Any site that I trust enough to visit, I trust enough to use their certs.
How do you know whether you trust a site enough to visit it? The cert could be for PayPaI.com (capital i looks like lowercase L) or xn--itibank-xjg.com (appears as citibank.com, though using a C-shaped Cyrillic s). Comodo could explain this away as part of Dragon's phishing filter.
Perhaps the closest comparison to Opera might be SeaMonkey because it has the built-in mail and news client. How big is SeaMonkey installed?
On the other hand, with Google Groups, Facebook, and the like, who uses NNTP for text newsgroups anymore? And with the shutdown of Usenet providers due to rampant copyright infringement in binary groups, who uses binary newsgroups anymore? Facebook and Gmail have even been eating into the SMTP/IMAP market.
If you RTFA (I know, it's tough) the author comes to the conclusion that none of them are special at all and are at worst scam marketing gimmicks.
... more then just a browser to get people to change. I've often wondered why TOR developers don't integrate something like bit-torrent like protocol combined with an anonymity service like onion routing and a browser all in one, anyone who is using the browser and wants to keep their privacy automatically becomes part of an anonymity swarm instead of having separate packages just have it all integrated and take the end user out of the loop. For most people that will do. For the power users they can download custom stuff like what is available now.
With all the bs going on with corporations owning the governments of the world and trying to take away peoples rights it's about time someone actually did something about it in terms of combining all the features into one complete package that grows more powerful/useful as people use it.
First point:
Just because there were only minor changes, doesn't make it a scam.
Second point:
This is based on some blog back when it was based on vers 5 of chrome sources. It is currently based on vers 16.. This is wildly out of date.
I use Iron Portable ver 16 as a backup browser and it does exactly what it should. Installs nothing in your system, except in the install directory, doesn't call home like Googles version and is a perfectly good alternative browser.
It is not a scam, because some outdated blog says so.
Comodo is a certificate authority; that is, they sell EV certificates (among other sorts of certificates). That should explain everything for you.
if an HTTPS site uses a certificate that's domain validated, Dragon raises a warning "that the organization operating it may not have undergone trusted third-party validation that it is a legitimate business."
I'm all in favor of checking whether a commercial site has an identifiable, legitimate business behind it. We do that with SiteTruth, and it filters out a huge number of junk sites. We divide SSL certs into three categories - "domain control only validated", "business validated", and "extended validation". A "domain control only" cert has no identify value. The CA/Browser Forum is formalizing this distinction with their new cert issuance guidelines. The 3 levels of certs are now an industry wide standard.
SSL certs aren't the only game in town. There are other hard data sources for validating web sites. We use SSL certs, BBB and BBBonline records, purchased commercial databases of businesses, US Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and a few other sources. If a site is selling something and comes up empty in all of those, maybe you should buy from someone else.
I'm not saying that such sites should be blocked by a browser, though. Moved down in search results, yes. Users warned, yes. Hard blocked, no. (However, links to them in emails, tweets, and forum posts are a good indication of spam.)
Comodo has something of a conflict of interest in checking for certs, but they do accept certs other than their own. It's not a paid "Seal of Approval" racket.
IE9. Microsoft has matured with its browser from the medieval times of IE5.
Speaking as an end-user; no, it hasn't.
Speaking as a web developer; no, it hasn't.
Use Firefox, Opera, Safari or Chrome. Not IE in any version.
Not yet anyway, IE9 is far better than previous IE's, so I've got some hope for IE10.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Nice recap of a Slashdot recap of what I discovered item by item a long time ago. I'll leave it to my betters to decide if Iron has any "evil" code snuck in, but otherwise it felt that most of the Chromium alternates are boring.
Disclosure: I'm still a Firefox fan myself, so maybe all browser spinoffs are boring, but somehow the FF ones feel more varied. I'm on Cometbird at the moment, which has the amusing side feature among other things of blocking Hulu's ads, so if I'm watching shows there I get 2 min of silence to do something rather than the assault of ads.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Nice notes. I had Comodo Dragon installed for a while, I only later removed it on a simplifying run. But you're spot on about the agendas: Even if *at the moment* Chrome is only "schoolyard evil", because it's the flagship browser of Google, any random day they could gleefully tweak some of the internals so that it contributes to that new super-surveillance mission they just announced. Comodo is a Security Company, so even if they make a mistake in one build that lets data through to somewhere, their guideline is to protect the user.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If you're talking about things like being logged into sites where all of the new instances of the browser "remember you are logged in", then why use Chrome at all if that's technically the reason to use SomeOtherBrowser? Just use both Firefox and a Spinoff! Firefox logged in doesn't know that Cometbird for example "is also Firefox" so you get browser isolation as desired.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I've discussed this with Animats before. Apparently, non-commercial sites should carry no advertising, not even advertising solely to pay the hosting bill. If you have ads on your site, you're a business, even if the IRS would class the site as a hobby.
You could argue that Ctrl+F only needs the left hand
Ctrl+F is a pinky curl and finger spread on Windows and Linux, and Cmd+F is a thumb curl on a Mac. Should I photograph my hand executing these chords?
allowing you to leave the right on the mouse, but unless you're going to type the search one-handed*, it's not really beneficial.
I find myself pushing Ctrl+F while my right hand is traveling from the mouse to the JKL; keys. With "/", you can't start the gesture until your right hand is all the way onto the keyboard. Another bonus: Ctrl+F works even while an editable field (URL bar, <input type="text">, or <textarea>) happens to be focused, which is helpful when looking for the phrase that you were going to clean up in a long article on Wikipedia, TV Tropes, or your own personal wiki.
Nope.
The article title is "alternatives are worth trying" and in fact the article summary is that whatever niche thing the alternatives do is usually easily do-able with the basic chromium and some addons. So really the author is saying they AREN'T worth the effort unless you have an obsessive need to address some trivial issue and downloading a whole new browser is easier for you than to modify the defaults yourself. (shrug)
-Styopa
...to mention Firefox
Well I've always thought Comodo made some really solid products. While i prefer avast for my home users for businesses you really can't beat Comodo Internet Security, they let small businesses use it free and it has really top notch AV and firewall controls. Frankly i soured on Google when they started spamming first the toolbar and then Chrome with freeware, i feel if you make a good product you shouldn't HAVE to spam and the fact Google has become far worse than Sun and MSFT ever were when it comes to spamming freeware with Chrome makes me leery of going anywhere near it and their recent announcement of tying everything together just makes me more so.
Comodo has made a few mistakes in the past but were quick to announce them and send out revocations for the affected certs and in every test I've seen Comodo security software is always in the top 5 so that's good enough for me and my customers. Plus they love the speed, I put Comodo Secure DNS on as default in the browser and frankly their DNS is fast fast fast, much faster than the local ISPs. Every customer i give the Dragon to always ends up telling me how much faster their browsing is now and want me to send them links so they can send their friends the links to Comodo and ABP. so far knock on plastic every customer I've given Comodo dragon along with Comodo IS or Avast free has been 100% malware free so that is all i need to know, its really good at killing phishing sites and stopping malware sites from loading and when you are talking about home users every extra bit of protection helps.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I got bored navigating the article. Do any of the spinoffs make infoworld.com less terrible?
The world can ding Firefox all it wants. Yes. I too have the endless memory leakage.
Nothing else can be as ng.significantly customised for my utility and privacy. Nothing.
Nor does anything else manage tabs as elegantly. Yes, I'm the person with 30-80 in a session, and cull them over weeks. It beats any "bookmarks". :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Switched the same day I installed Chrome, after reading the license and promptly uninstalling it. Never switched back. Love how it runs off a flash drive.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Stupid Chrome won't allow you to make and exception to accept invalid certs.
My webmail provider won't get a valid cert, so I have to click through every time to get to my mail.
Firefox you can add an exception if you trust the cert. Chrome decided to not allow this, despite many pleas to do so.
I tried to manually add the cert, but something somewhere is wonky with my flavor of FC. Plus, who wants to run command line scripts to add some silly cert? Just give me a multi-click-through like firefox. From reading up, the FC folks blame chrome and chrome blames FC.
Stupid.