Chromium browsers

April 20, 2017 — November 3, 2020

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standards
UI

A web browser engine used in many modern browsers, all fairly similar.

1 Which flavour?

1.1 Chromium

Chromium is the open source browser at the core of the Google Chrome browser. It’s missing some google widgets and sync technology, but also probably spies on you less.

1.2 Google Chrome

The closed-source version of the Chromium project. Chrome is making changes that seem likely to sap autonomy and give advertisers your data, and it does suspicious user tracking. On the other hand, the ecosystem contains cool extensions that I like to use, and is a dominant standard so stuff is very likley to work on it.

Chrome is sometimes (but not always) subject to the same odd emoji quirk as Brave, below.

1.3 Brave

Left field entrant, hyped upstart Brave attempts to block the conventional ad economy and privacy nonsense and replace it with cryptocurrency-backed privacy-compatible advertising. It seems to be largely Google Chrome compatible, supporting most of the same plugins etc. It claims blocking the tracking economy overhead makes it faster. Using it is smooth so far.

Weird quirk: on linux after each upgrade the emoji break in subtly different ways. Sometimes it helps to reinstall color emoji

sudo apt-get reinstall fonts-noto-color-emoji

Sometimes it helps to remove the outdated Unicode 9.0 symbola font

sudo apt-get remove font-symbola

Some XML config may make the problem go away.

1.4 Arc

2 Backspace for backspace not back-one-page

In Chrome AFAICT this is no longer a problem. They disabled backspace navigation since it appears to be causing frequent data loss relative to intentional use. There is an extension to disable the shortcut if you are on an old version of Chrome.

3 Privacy

Various privacy-related tweaks are advisable. See browsing confidentially.

4 Searches

Chrome magically supports the search option on almost any site that searches via the tab to search feature.

5 Incoming

Tamperchrome — edit the requests that a browser makes. Super nerdy.

Viewimage fixes google search.

Miscellaneous Chrome command line switches.