runt18 / ungoogled-chromium

Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration and enhancing privacy, control, and transparency

ungoogled-chromium

Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration and enhancing privacy, control, and transparency

A number of features or background services communicate with Google servers despite the absence of an associated Google account or compiled-in Google API keys. Furthermore, the normal build process for Chromium involves running Google's own high-level commands that invoke many scripts and utilities, some of which download and use pre-built binaries provided by Google. Even the final build output includes some pre-built binaries. Fortunately, the source code is available for everything.

ungoogled-chromium is a set of configuration flags, patches, and custom scripts. These components altogether strive to accomplish the following:

• Disable or remove offending services and features that communicate with Google or weaken privacy
• Strip binaries from the source tree, and use those provided by the system or build them from source
• Add, modify, or disable features that inhibit control and transparency (these changes are minor and do not have significant impacts on the general user experience)

ungoogled-chromium is looking for contributors. See the Contributing, Reporting, Contacting section for more information.

Table of Contents

• Features
  • Supported platforms and distributions
• Download pre-built packages
• Getting the source code
• Frequently-asked questions
• Design and implementation
• Building
• Contributing, Reporting, Contacting
  • Pull requests
• Credits
• License

Features

In addition to features from Debian, Inox patchset, and Iridium Browser:

• Replace many web domains in the source code with non-existent alternatives ending in qjz9zk (known as domain substitution)
• Strip binaries from the source code (known as source cleaning)
  • This includes all pre-built executables, shared libraries, and other forms of machine code. They are substituted with system or user-provided equivalents, or built from source.
  • However a few data files (e.g. *_page_model.bin that define page models for the DOM Distiller) are left in as they do not contain machine code and are needed for building.
• Disable functionality specific to Google domains (e.g. Google Host Detector, Google URL Tracker, Google Cloud Messaging, Google Hotwording, etc.)
• Add Omnibox search provider "No Search" to allow disabling of searching
• Disable automatic formatting of URLs in Omnibox (e.g. stripping http://, hiding certain parameters)
• Disable JavaScript dialog boxes from showing when a page closes (onbeforeunload events)
  • Bypasses the annoying dialog boxes that spawn when a page is being closed
• Added menu item under "More tools" to clear the HTTP authentication cache on-demand
• Force all pop-ups into tabs
• Disable Safe Browsing
  • See the FAQ
• Disable WebRTC
  • This will be configurable in the future.
• Disable intranet redirect detector
  • Prevents unnecessary invalid DNS requests to the DNS server.
  • This breaks captive portal detection, but captive portals still work.
• Add more URL schemes allowed for saving
  • Note that this generally works only for the MHTML option, since an MHTML page is generated from the rendered page and not the original cached page like the HTML option.
• (Iridium Browser feature change) Prevent URLs with the trk: scheme from connecting to the Internet
  • Also prevents any URLs with the top-level domain qjz9zk (as used in domain substitution) from attempting a connection.
• (Iridium and Inox feature change) Prevent pinging of IPv6 address when detecting the availability of IPv6
• Support for building Debian and Ubuntu packages
  • Creates a separate package chrome-sandbox for the SUID sandbox
    • Not necessary to install if the kernel option unprivileged_userns_clone is enabled
• Windows support with these changes:
  • Build wow_helper.exe from source instead of using the pre-built version
  • Build swapimport.exe from source instead of downloading it from Google (requires customized syzygy source code)
  • Build yasm.exe from source instead of using the pre-built version
  • Use user-provided building utilities instead of the ones bundled with Chromium (currently gperf and bison)
  • Do not set the Zone Identifier on downloaded files (which is a hassle to unset)

DISCLAIMER: Although it is the top priority to eliminate bugs and privacy-invading code, there will be those that slip by due to the fast-paced growth and evolution of the Chromium project.

Supported platforms and distributions

• Linux
  • Debian
  • Ubuntu
  • Arch Linux (no packages yet)
  • Other distributions: semi-statically-linked builds
    • This build statically links the libraries provided by Google with source code available. It is not a full statically-linked binary. Done via is_official_build=true GN flag
• Windows
• macOS

Download pre-built packages

Downloads for the latest release

List of all releases

The release versioning scheme follows that of the tags. See the next section for more details.

Getting the source code

Users are encouraged to use one of the tags. The master branch is not guaranteed to be in a working state.

Tags are versioned in the following format: {chromium_version}-{release_revision} where

• chromium_version is the version of Chromium used in x.x.x.x format, and
• release_revision is a number indicating the version of ungoogled-chromium for the corresponding Chromium version.

Frequently-asked questions

See FAQ.md

Design and implementation

See DESIGN.md

Building

See BUILDING.md

Contributing, Reporting, Contacting

Use the Issue Tracker for problems, suggestions, and questions. There is also a Gitter chat room that serves the same purpose.

Contributors are welcome!

If you are interested in making a change, I, Eloston, encourage you to submit a pull request. Please read the Pull requests section below for submission guidelines.

• Additionally, issues marked with the help wanted tag are changes I need others to help with. Please read the issue's comment thread for more details on what needs to be done.

Pull requests

Pull requests are also welcome. Here are some guidelines:

• Changes that fix certain configurations or add small features and do not break compatibility are generally okay
• Larger changes, such as those that change buildlib, should be proposed through an issue first before submitting a pull request.
• When in doubt, propose the idea through an issue first.

Credits

Iridium Browser

Inox patchset

Debian

The Chromium Project

License

GPLv3. See LICENSE