I’m trying to make everything I do online as secure as possible, while compromizing my expereince as little as possible. The most significant choice here is my web browser.

I rotate between a lot of them because none of the realistic options I’ve found meet all of my requirements.

Requirements:

Preferred:

So, Chromium meets my security requirements, but it’s unrealistic for a few reasons:

It has no way to download a compliled binary for the stable track

If you want to use Chromium, you have to build it yourself, or download a binary someone else built. I don’t generally trust 3rd-party compiled binaries, and I don’t want to have to build a binary each new release. If you’re only running Linux distros that have Chromium in their repositories, it’s a pretty great choice, but I have Macs and Android too much in my daily workflow.

No Automatic Updates

This isn’t really a deal-breaker but it does pose a problem, espeically when you have to build each version yourself.

Made by Google

(This is vereing a bit from security practices into mild paranoia.) If possible, I prefer my browser to come from a non-profit – or failing that, somewhere that has proven their primary devotion is the open web with little or no “distractions”.

Long Story Short

Chromium would be great if there were available binaries for the stable track. Best would be if Mozilla implements sandboxing and U2f support. In the meantime, everything is a compromise. Or I might spin up a VM on my hypervisor just for Chromium builds.

Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/110751683@N02/13792583873