If you’re a Chrome user concerned about web privacy then you might have tried turning off telemetry settings, maybe switching to Chromium to lose all that Google code.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Even Chromium uses pre-built Google binaries and communicates with Google servers to provide various features.

Ungoogled-chromium is an open-source Chromium variant which disables or removes these remaining Google-related functions, replaces Google’s pre-built binaries by recreating them from source, and throws in some smaller tweaks and enhancements of its own.

This de-Googling is quite extreme, and has some far-reaching consequences. Losing Google’s Webstore plugin means you can’t easily install extensions from the store, for instance, and must use an awkward manual workaround instead (download the crx separately, drag and drop it onto the extensions tab).

Safe Browsing is disabled, too, as it communicates with Google’s servers to download the blacklists.

Lose all the Google telemetry and code in a single step

You also don’t get Google’s own Flash player, so will have to install Adobe’s version or ignore the technology entirely (okay, that could actually be an advantage.)

If you can live with this, there’s no doubt that ungoogled-chromium does much more to protect your privacy than similar projects. And it has other tweaks you might like, too, including disabling onbeforeunload events (no more annoying dialog boxes which appear when a page is being closed) and forcing all pop-ups into tabs.

If you’re at all interested in the idea, grab the program and try it for yourself. There’s no installation required and it won’t interfere with any existing Chromium or Chrome setup- just unzip it and run.

Ungoogled-chromium is an open-source application for Windows 7+, Linux and Mac.