Iron Browser (Chromium with all the required add-ons) [Open Source]

What is Iron Browser?

Iron Browser is an enhanced version of the excellent Google Chrome browser. Google, however, has been criticized heavily by the data protection specialists for the fact that it creates a unique user ID for each of its Chrome user and sends entries to  Google to generate suggestions. Iron Browser offers same wonderful browser experience as it is build on the Chome’s source and offers and looks the same. But it protects your privacy.

For example: it Client ID does not exist in Iron browser. There are many other things in original Chrome’s code that may be regarded as threat to privacy. You can take a look at all the differences at this link

More significant differences include the inclusion of Adblocker and ability to change the User-Agent easily by modifying the UA.ini.

Installation:

Since the file is a gz file, you will have to hit the terminal and type these commands one-by-one

• tar xvf iron-linux.tar.gz
• cd iron-linux
• ./iron

After doing that, you can simply launch the iron’s binary file by going to the directory where the files have been unzipped. Just like the original Chrome, it will ask you if you wish to import the settings from the Firefox the first time you launch it.

Here are couple of screenshots of Iron Browser running on my Acer Aspire D250 netbook:

Direct Download Links:

1. For 32-bit (most netbooks fall into this category except for the recent ones http://www.srware.net/downloads/iron-linux.tar.gz
2. For 64-bit http://www.srware.net/downloads/iron-linux-64.tar.gz

[SRware’s Iron official webpage]

Conclusion: Iron Browser is a well-bred mixture of quality browser and security features. More importantly, it does not sends your data to Google and respects your privacy.

credit: Jennifer (via email)