According to StatCounter, 70% of all desktop users worldwide use Google Chrome as their default Internet browser. A sad fact, as Chrome is a proprietary web browser that does not respect user privacy by default.

Chromium, however, is %100 open source and licensed under the BSD license. Chrome extensions do work on Chromium.

Still, we do not recommend any user who cares about his/her privacy to use Google Chrome or Chromium, as both browsers are full of Google’s integrated services which phone-home some of your data, besides their horrible default settings for privacy which block nothing by default.

Instead, we recommended using Firefox, but if you still want a Chromium-based browser to use (Whether for performance or because of the huge number of extensions… etc), then what we recommend is the Ungoogled-Chromium browser or Brave instead.

However, what can’t be reached entirely shouldn’t be wholly left.

Here’s a list of 7 privacy-preserving extensions to have if you are still going to use Chrome/Chromium browsers anyway. Or maybe you can even use them with the Ungoogled-Chromium browser, which is a better choice.

These extensions work with any Chromium-based browser: Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium… All of them are supported.

Privacy-Preserving Addons for Chromium Browsers

chromium 5
Privacy-Preserving Extensions for Chromium-based Browsers
  1. uBlock Origin: The best and most lightweight extension for blocking ads on the web. It is important that you keep it on so that your browser can keep the ads that track you across the web. You may wish later to disable it on the websites you want to support, though, like ours! 😉
  2. Privacy Badger: An extension from EFF to block tracking scripts and 3rd-party cookies tracking. Websites you visit may keep some cookies stored on your browser, and other 3rd-party websites may try to access them, so Privacy Badger comes to the rescue to prevent this from happening. Additionally, it blocks most, if not all, tracking scripts on most websites.
  3. Bitwarden: A free and open source privacy password manager. It is completely free to use, but you will need to set up an account on their website before you can use the integrated extension on your web browser to manage your passwords and 2FA logins.
  4. Cookies AutoDelete: An absolute must-have. The way it works is that it removes all the cookies associated with a tab once you close it. So in this way, other websites won’t be able to track you with cookies at all (Unless they are opened at the same time). It may be hard to develop the habit of closing the tabs you don’t need once you finish using them, and it may be hard to re-login every time you close the tab, but the extra privacy is quite huge from following this approach. However, keep in mind to enable the “Active Mode” in the settings of this extension and set it to 1 seconds, and also to disable notifications to avoid annoying you:
    chromium 7
  5. MinerBlock: Sadly Chrome/Chromium/Ungoogled-Chromium do not block miner scripts by default. Miner scripts are huge resource-hungry scripts that work on your browser through the websites you visit to mine cryptocurrencies for them, and some website owners use this approach to fund themselves instead of relying on ads. This extension blocks them.
  6. ScriptSafe: This extension is a life-savior for privacy on Chromium-based browsers. It blocks a huge deal of privacy-hijacking techniques such as fingerprinting, WebRTC leaks, user-agent tracking, referral tracking, and much much more. However, it uses a strict mode by default which causes most websites to break, so you have to go to the extension’s settings and change the “Default Mode” from Block to Allow:
    chromium 9
    After that, you may consider enabling/disabling the other privacy and fingerprinting-protection settings however you wish:
    chromium 11
  7. Remove Google Redirection: If you are planning to use Google as your search engine, then this extension helps you by removing Google’s tracking layer on the search results you see. In this way, search results will point to the original websites’ URLs instead of Google’s tracking links.

Conclusion

So you should be good to go now with these extensions. It is true that none of the Chromium-based browsers have any significant default settings to preserve privacy by default (other than Brave maybe), but loaded with these extensions, you’ll be perfectly fine to browse freely on the Internet.

On the other hand, we still recommend using Firefox with the other privacy-preserving addons for it. It is a better choice on the long run and supporting Firefox – even by just using it – will help create a better web for all of us. So if you really care for that future, you may consider the switch.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Newsletter

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter. We only send you an email when we have a couple of new posts or some important updates to share.

Recent Comments

Open Source Directory

Join the Force!

For the price of one cup of coffee per month:

  • Support the FOSS Post to produce more content.
  • Get a special account on our website.
  • Remove all the ads you are seeing (including this one!).
  • Get an OPML file containing +70 RSS feeds for various FOSS-related websites and blogs, so that you can import it into your favorite RSS reader and stay updated about the FOSS world!