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I've been using SRWare Iron (a Chromium Distribution) because of privacy concerns.

The problem is that they don't update Iron very often and I am considering switching to Chrome because I don't want to use an insecure browser.

On their Iron vs. Chrome page they list a number of 'problems' that are disabled by default in Iron but can apparently be configured to be 'privacy friendly' in Chrome.

What settings do I have to change to get the same privacy features of Iron in Chrome? What else do I have to watch out for?

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3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

You could use chromium instead of chrome wich is actually chrome without many of googles tools. This is realy detailed explained here

Another thing is the strange background of iron as a marketing agenda the story of iron

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+1 for mentioning the back-story! – Bobby Aug 5 '10 at 11:15
What exactly did you mean with your suggestion to use Chromium? There are no binaries. – chris Aug 5 '10 at 13:30
I was not aware of missing windows binaries. On many Linux distros packages are available. If you do not want to complile it yourself (compiling does not hurt and is worth the better privacy :) you could try buildbots automatic build build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp – matthias krull Aug 5 '10 at 16:37
+1 Interesting history. Funny to see Peter "DrPizza" Bright of arstechnica.com/author/peter-bright on there! – Ryan Clarke Aug 10 '12 at 23:43
up vote 0 down vote accepted

I've now switched to Chrome and disabled the following options:

  • Suggestions for navigation errors
  • Address bar suggestions
  • DNS pre-fetching
  • Phishing and malware protection
  • Usage statistics and crash reports

I've also disabled the GoogleUpdater (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run).

AFAIK this should have the same privacy features from Iron with the frequent updates from Google.

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up vote -1 down vote

I was under the impression, no I am sure, that IRON allows the user to use a file to blacklist URLs, and that I use this as an "ad-blocker" of sorts. This was actually the original reason I started using it. Chrome does not have this.

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You can use Ad-blocking extensions with Chrome. An example is AdBlock Plus. – galacticninja Oct 1 '12 at 3:44

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