ungoogled-chromium

A Google Chromium variant focusing on removing Google integration, enhancing privacy, and adding features

Features

In addition to features provided by Iridium Browser and Inox patchset, the following is also included:

• 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 some data files (e.g. icudtl.dat for Unicode and Globalization support and *_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.
• Remove additional detection of and disable specific functionality for Google hosts
• Disable searching in Omnibox
• Disable automatic formatting of URL in Omnibox
• Disable JavaScript dialog boxes from showing when a page closes (onbeforeunload dialog boxes)
• Added menu item under "More tools" to clear the HTTP authentication cache on-demand
• Disable persistent per-site settings in Preferences file
• Force all pop-ups into tabs
• Disable intranet redirect detector (unnecessary invalid DNS requests)
• Add more URL schemes allowed for saving
• (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
• Windows support with additional 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.

Getting ungoogled-chromium

Users are encouraged to use one of the available tag versions. Binaries are available on the releases page for the corresponding tag.

Tags are formatted in the following manner: {chromium_version}-{release_revision} where

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

The master branch is for development, so it is not guaranteed to be in a working state.

Currently supported platforms and distributions:

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Windows
• Mac OS (partial; see Building)

ungoogled-chromium's design

Features are implemented through a combination of build flags, patches, and a few configuration files for scripts. All of these settings are stored in the resources directory. The resources directory contains the common directory, which has such files that apply to all platforms. All other directories, named by platform, contain additional platform-specific data. Most of the features, however, are stored in the common directory.

There are currently two automated scripts that process the source code:

• Source cleaner - Used to clean out binary files (i.e. do not seem to be human-readable text files, except a few required for building)
• Domain substitution - Used to replace Google and other domains in the source code to eliminate communication not caught by the patches and build flags.

These are the general steps that ungoogled-chromium takes to build:

1. Get the source code archive in .tar.xz format via https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/
2. Run source cleaner (done during source archive extraction)
3. Run domain substitution
4. Apply patches
5. Configure the build utilities and run meta-build configuration (i.e. GYP, not GN. See Issue #16)
6. Build (via 'ninja')

Here's a breakdown of what is in a resources directory:

• cleaning_list - (Used for source cleaning) A list of files to be excluded during the extraction of the Chromium source
• domain_regex_list - (Used for domain substitution) A list of regular expressions that define how domains will be replaced in the source code
• domain_substitution_list - (Used for domain substitution) A list of files that are processed by domain_regex_list
• gn_args.ini - A list of GN arguments to use for building. (Currently unused, see Issue #16)
• gyp_flags - A list of GYP flags to use for building.
• patches/ - Contains patches. common/patches directory contains patches that provide the main features of ungoogled-chromium (as listed above) and can be applied on any platform (but are not necessarily designed to affect all platforms). However, other patches/ directories in other platform directories are platform-specific. The contents of common/patches are explained more in-depth below.
  • patch_order - The order to apply the patches in. Patches from common should be applied before the one for a platform.

All of these files are human-readable, but they are usually processed by the Python building system. See the Building section below for more information.

Here's a breakdown of the common/patches directory:

• ungoogled-chromium/ - Contains new patches for ungoogled-chromium. They implement the features described above.
• iridium-browser - Contains a subset of patches from Iridium Browser.
  • Patches are not touched unless they do not apply cleanly onto the version of Chromium being built
  • Patches are from the patchview branch of Iridium's Git repository. Git webview of the patchview branch
• inox-patchset/ - Contains a modified subset of patches from Inox patchset.
  • Patches are from inox-patchset's GitHub
  • Inox patchset's license
• debian/ - Contains patches from Debian's Chromium.
  • These patches are not Debian-specific. For those, see the resources/debian/patches directory

Building

See BUILDING.md

Contributing

Contributers are welcome!

Use the Issue Tracker for problems, suggestions, and questions.

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 for build scripts

The Chromium Project

License

GPLv3. See LICENSE