I used to be a proud user of Firefox but updates after updates, the slowness finally kicked me out of its userbase After that, I started to look for something else. And there is only one big opponent to Firefox: Chrome… But well, there is an issue.
I’m not a big fan of Google.
I use some Google services like Gmail (even if on my 4 email address, I host 3 on my server), YouTube, Reader (not for long, I’m looking for something else) and Search but I stopped to use Drive and other services.
The main reason is that I’m against their business model: they make money with what they know about you. I’ve an iPhone, 3 computers running W7 (maybe one W8 update someday) and Fedora but nothing from Google. Why pay for a phone twice more expensive than an Android device? Google. I read an interesting blog post some times ago: “The main difference between Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft is that Apple and Microsoft want to sell devices and/or software. Amazon want you to buy things on their website and Google to show you ads.”. When you buy an Apple/MS product, they are happy, when you buy a Kindle/Android thing, it just the beginning.
But, I want a new good browser!
Chromium
Chromium is the OpenSource project under Chrome: Google takes Chromium source code, add few proprietary API and tracking stuffs then change the logo and release it.
Great! I found my new best browser… but everything seems too amazing, a little bit like when you finish a math test at the half of the time, it must be a trick somewhere…
No auto-update :(
Chrome can update himself, silently and quite fast but it seems to be a part of the Google code because Chromium can’t. And if you’re, like me, quite paranoiac about security, it’s a huge issue, does that mean that I’ll have to find a new browser, when I was so close to find my goal?
Nah, I’m not a developer for nothing, I can create something to update Chromium.
I spent few hours to figure out how everything work and I made a small updater. It’s not perfect, only work on Windows, need to be compiled for every computer and can’t start the update itself but it works. Details are on the README file
Edit 26/02/2013: Updated to launch the binary itself Edit 16/06/2016: Moved the code to Github
It’s not on github because I’m a git-noob but you can submit your patches :)
Enjoy and tell me what you think about it
Taiki ~