Ask HN: chromium vs chrome

3 points by _nato_ ↗ HN
I am not that persnickety, but I thought it would be cool if everything I did w/ browser was not somehow channeled back to google. It was my understanding that chromium does not do this. Is this true? How can it be true? Thanks HN!

2 comments

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See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Differen...

In particular: "RLZ tracking when Chrome is downloaded as part of marketing promotions and distribution partnerships. This transmits information in encoded form to Google, e.g., when and from where Chrome has been downloaded. In June 2010, Google confirmed that the RLZ tracking token is not present in versions of Chrome downloaded from the Google website directly or in any version of Chromium. The RLZ source code was also made open source at the same time so that developers can confirm what it is and how it works"

More details here: http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/in-open-for-rlz.html

Plus Chromium is open source, so you're free to check that it doesn't transmit to Google yourself.

The RLZ tracking is not active anymore, from what I can remember.