There’s an open-source spinoff from Chrome already: it’s called Iron (the website is in German, but Incomplete News translated it).

When you install Chrome, there’s a check box that says “report crash data and usage statistics to Google”. You don’t have to tick this, of course, but if you do, Chrome generates a unique ID for the installation and reports the statistics back using that. Now for some people this may not be a concern, but for lovers of privacy, freedom and civil liberties, the 1984-Big-Brother data-collection conglomerate that is Google is starting to get a bit scary.

So the nice people at SRWare have taken out the unique ID, the data reporting back to Google, and as a bonus they have updated Iron to the latest version of Webkit.

Now this last point is significant, although if you weren’t following the tirades against Apple when they took time to update Safari you’ll have missed it. Chrome contains a vulnerability that means it can install malware on your system, but Iron doesn’t. If you need any more persuading to switch from Chrome to Iron, then I don’t think you ever will.

Yes, it’s browser wars time again. Essentially, the marks for Chrome are replicated for Iron, but it gets 2 extra points for using a fixed version of WebKit and the additional privacy features.

Download Squad has more here.

Tags: browser wars, Google Chrome, Iron, open source, webkit

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 12:29 and is filed under Applications, Misc, WWW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.