The developers of Iron have created a privacy and feature comparison that highlights privacy issues identified in Chrome and how SRWare Iron handles those issues.

Chrome features like the installation ID, error reporting or suggest do not exist in the Iron web browser. Another feature that is not used is Google Updater, which is a system process that checks for updates periodically.

A missing auto-update functionality on the other hand means that users need to monitor the web page of the project for information about new versions that are released by the developers. New versions often introduce privacy or security fixes to the browser which highlights that it is essential to update the browser as quickly as possible.

The third party application SRWare Iron Auto-Updater for Windows adds the automatic update functionality to Iron. The program is however more versatile than Google Update. When you start the portable software for the first time you will see a screenshot that looks like the following.

The program tries to locate the Iron path on the local hard drive automatically. You can click on the Browse button if it is has not been identified correctly, or if you are running multiple versions of the browser on your system.

The update and download url should remain untouched. They both point to the official project website. The update check interval has been set to six hours, which some users may want to reduce to make sure they update the browser as soon as an update is released by SRWare.

The automatically start with Windows box can be checked to autostart the updater with the operating system.

You can download SRWare Iron Auto-Updater from Softpedia. The software is fully compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

While that surely works it is not the same as to simply flip a switch and have the ad blocking functionality. This is currently not possible in Google Chrome but it is possible in its Open-Source pendant SRWare Iron. Iron is based on the Chromium source that is also used in Google Chrome. The advantages of Iron are increased privacy and security.

What many users do not know is that it is possible to enable ad blocking in the Iron browser. This is done by downloading a file called adblock.ini from the developers homepage and copying that file into the main SRWare Iron directory replacing the blank file of the same name.

The adblock.ini file contains information to block hundreds of advertisers, included are all the popular advertising companies like Google and Yahoo.

Update: A lot has changed in the last two years. Google Chrome is now supporting extensions, and several adblockers have been created for the browser to hide advertisement on websites.

Among the options are ScriptNo, an extension that blocks all scripts from running automatically in the web browser, or Adblock Plus, one of the most popular adblockers on today’s Internet.

Both extensions block ads in the Chrome browser. They do come with options to let some ads through and only block annoying or irritating advertisements.