Klaus Zimmermann's Corner

Testing two-in-one for ungoogled-chromium browser

Go into any neckbeard Archlinux forum and you'll see a common recommendation of the presumably ultimate browser ever: ungoogled-chromium. The promise, apparently, is all the power and security from a multi billion-dollar corporation minus all the evils of the tracking and advertising it promotes for a living. Sounds like the ultimate freeloading, and the epitome of the true power of free software - but is it for real? Only way to find out is to get down and use it.

Unfortunately, main distros don't share the same love for privacy-protecting software, and don't include what's an unofficial spin of another main package. The closest we have is this entry on the Arch User Repository, which apparently takes quite a while and effort to compile from source. So what to do?

Luckily, there's an alternative to all that work: flatpak. I don't exactly agree with its tremendous use of resources usually, but for this use case, the sandboxed application itself - a browser! - is already pretty bloated, so why not? Plus, it makes removing it much easier if I don't like it later.

So from now on, I'll be testing two things for one use case: ungoogled-chromium via flatpak. This could become an interesting post in the future, too, so let's see. :)