SRWare Iron is a Chromium-based

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

developed by the

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company SRWare. It primarily aims to eliminate usage tracking and other privacy-compromising functionality that the Google Chrome browser includes. Iron ships with certain Chromium privacy options switched on by default, it provides some additional features that distinguish it from Google Chrome.

Development history

Iron was first released as a

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on 18 September 2008, 16 days after Google Chrome's initial release. On 26 May 2009 a Preview-Release (

Pre-Alpha A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

) of Iron came out for

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. And on 7 January 2010 a beta version for

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was released. On 11 August 2010,

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updated the

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website in order to include Iron as one of the possible choices. More recent versions of Iron have been released since then, which has gained the features of the underlying Chromium codebase, including Google Chrome theme support, a user agent switcher, an extension system, integrated Adblocker and improved Linux support. Support for Windows XP ended with version 50, but all older versions are still available. With version 55.0.2900, control of WebRTC is taken over by an add-on. Therefore, the "WebRTC disabled" builds are no longer available.

Differences from Chrome

The following Google Chrome features are not present in Iron: * RLZ identifier, an encoded string sent together with all queries to Google. ''See Which Google Domain'' *

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access on startup for users with Google as default search. *

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-hosted error pages when a server is not present. *

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automatic installation. * DNS pre-fetching, because it could potentially be used by spammers. * Automatic

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search suggestions. * Opt-in sending of both browser usage statistics and crash information to Google. *

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. Added features include: * An

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. * A user agent switcher. * Opt-in blocking of other background communications, such as extension, GPU blacklist, and certificate revocation updates. * Increased number of recent page thumbnails shown on the New Tab page.

Criticism

In December 2014, '' Lifehacker'' said that Iron offers little that is not available by simply configuring Google Chrome's privacy settings. However, ''the_simple_computer'' wrote that Iron removes the

, Google's custom navigation and error pages and other similar features. In October 2014, ''the_simple_computer'' wrote that even though SRWare Iron released under the BSD licence, the latest source code publicly available at the time was incomplete and for version 6, even though the binaries were on version 14; source code was moved to

RapidShare RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users si ...

in 2013, with external access blocked, effectively making the program "entirely closed source". In the same year, '' Lifehacker'' wrote that SRWare had not released the browser's source code for years. In 2015, SRWare temporarily resumed releasing the source code for the browser.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Srware Iron 2008 software Cloud clients Web browsers Windows web browsers Software based on WebKit Portable software

Development history

Differences from Chrome

Criticism

See also

References

External links