Chromium is an open source branch of chrome, offered as a convenience. It is not a standalone product with its own goals. Shouldn't there be a "Chromium-Privacy" project that branches Chromium and reviews code changes, to keep it aligned with such goals?
> Shouldn't there be a "Chromium-Privacy" project that branches Chromium and reviews code changes, to keep it aligned with such goals?
Maybe Iridium is what you're looking for. From their fp:
> Iridium is a free, open, and libre browser modification of the Chromium code base, with privacy being enhanced in several key areas. Automatic transmission of partial queries, keywords, metrics to central services inhibited and only occurs with consent. In addition, all our builds are reproducible, and modifications are auditable, setting the project ahead of other secure browser providers.
Unfortunately these forks -- of which there are many -- often fall behind Chromium's security updates and even introduce serious bugs of their own. E.g. "WhiteHat Aviator", another "security-oriented" fork, had this fiasco:
More went wrong with Aviator than that: they munged up the code rebranding it and made it much harder to track upstream. It also didn't start out open source!
Have you ever tried hacking on any of Google's "open source" projects? Android is ~100GB just to download for example, but I think chromium is smaller.
Privacy is not in Google's interests, so they aren't likely to help with any such effort, and I suspect the number of non-Google contributors is pretty low.
> Chromium is the name we have given to the open source project and the browser source code that we released and maintain at www.chromium.org. One can compile this source code to get a fully working browser. Google takes this source code, and adds on the Google name and logo, an auto-updater system called GoogleUpdate, and RLZ (described later in this post), and calls this Google Chrome. As such, everything which applies to Chromium below also applies to Google Chrome
