The release of Google Chrome and its Open Source counterpart Chromium put Google for the first time in the position that Microsoft was in for the last ten years or so. Users are looking at Microsoft products with suspicion suspecting privacy breaches and data collection on large scales. This is especially apparent in Microsoft operating systems where tools have been developed that turn off features that communicate with Microsoft servers.
It is a known fact that Google is collecting a massive amount of data. The main part stems from searches conducted on the search engine but other tools like the Google Toolbar add to that. Google on the other hand did not release a software until now that became such a center of criticism. Privacy advocates focused their criticism on two aspects of the Google Chrome browser.
The first was the unique user Id that was generated which could theoretically identify a user. The second that everything that was entered in the browser’s address bar was transmitted to Google even if the user never submitted the text to the search engine.
Several minor objections have come to light in the past week and software developers started to develop solutions that would eliminate identification and data transfers unless they were necessary.
Iron (vie Download Squad) was developed from the Open Source browser Chromium. That’s something that Google did encourage and the developers were the first to provide a version of Chromium that was stripped down of all known data collection and privacy problems: The client-ID, timestamp, suggest functionality, alternate error pages, error reporting, rlz-tracking, google updater and url tracker have been removed.
The functionality on the other hand remains the same. The only problem that could arise is if developers cannot keep up with the development pace of the Chromium browser. As of now this is the recommended release for users with privacy concerns.
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Does opera too collects any data from users computer?
Does anyone know of a portable version of Iron?
…I know people have put together portable versions of Chrome (with varied degrees of success).
Its right below the Iron link
I use Iron as my #2 browser. It is snappy, & unlike Opera, easy to figure out. SRWare hasn’t kept up w/ new versions of Chromium, however, & I wonder if there might be unpatched security issues in Iron; NP thus far in actual use, however.
I am hopeful Iron will get the same extensions as Chromium if & when Google offers them.
I’m using Iron 4.0.227 on Linux, with gPDF and several other extensions. They work just fine.