Bromite is Chromium plus some patches for ad blocking and enhanced privacy.
Bromite is only available for Android v4.4 and above.
Bromite aims at providing a no-clutter browsing experience without privacy-invasive features and with the addition of a fast ad-blocking engine. Minimal UI changes are applied to help curbing the idea of "browser as an advertisement platform".
Please donate to support development of Bromite and the costs for the build system.
โ Support development with a donation:
BTC donations address: 3MkC3idL61npQSCxL1gceksmRTkNkiCPcG
ETH donations address: 0xf47ff39223d828f99fec5ab53bd068c5c0522042
No. This is not a limitation of Bromite but of all Chromium-based projects in general, as general public is not allowed to use Google's APIs for free unless when using Chrome.
Additionally, these features would not be privacy-friendly.
No.
Yes, although this has not been verified (and hardly can be) under all situations; if you were to find connections to cloud-based services please report them via the issue tracker.
Bromite uses ungoogled-chromium's python script to disable URLs in the codebase since version 78.0.3904.93
.
Projects which follow a strict approach on this are Iridium and Inox patchset.
It is the core component of Android for all web page visualizations. For example when you access a new wifi network and need to activate it, that is using the SystemWebView. If you do not know what it is then you do not need to install it.
See also the wiki page for community-contributed installation instructions.
Ad-blocking was present and always enabled in the SystemWebView from version 72.0.3626.120
till version 77.0.3865.104
, when it stopped working due to upstream NetworkService changes.
See this wiki page.
No. We cannot add add-ons to Bromite (merely some features).
No, and this is unlikely to change. Many limitations apply for submissions there, including which ads are allowed to be blocked.
Bromite favors user freedom in software choice: the device is yours so you get to choose which software to run on it, end of the story.
It is not on the official F-Droid repository and there are no (more) plans to submit it.
You can use F-Droid client to install and receive updates via the official Bromite F-Droid repository.
Yes, since version 69. While the desktop version of Chromium has an option to disable it (video/audio site settings), the Android version cannot.
Using Bromite will favour the monopoly of the Chromium/Blink engine, why do you develop and maintain Bromite?
In short, to show what a Chromium-based engine could do for the user if the user experience and needs were the main focus of modern browser design.
For a browser using an alternative engine see Fennec F-Droid.
- customizable adblock filters via user-provided URL
- remove click-tracking and AMP from search results
- DNS-over-HTTPS support with any valid IETF DoH endpoint
- always-incognito mode
- all field triels permanently disabled
- QUIC disabled by default
- always-visible cookies, javascript and ads site settings
- removed Play integration binary blobs
- uses CFI on all architectures except x86
- disable media router and remoting by default
- disable dynamic module loading
- enable site-per-process isolation for all devices with memory > 1GB
- completely removed safe browsing and other privacy-unfriendly features
- proxy configuration page with PAC and custom proxy lists support
- StartPage, DuckDuckGo and Qwant search engines available by default
- chrome flags to disable custom intents and clear session on exit
- flags to toggle anti-fingerprinting mitigations for canvas, audio, client rects, webGL and sensor APIs
- use fixed User-Agent to conceal real model and browser version
- privacy enhancement patches from Iridium, Inox patchset, Brave and ungoogled-chromium projects
- security enhancement patches from GrapheneOS project
- import/export bookmarks
- allow playing videos in background tabs and disable pause on switching tabs
- all codecs included (proprietary, open H.264 etc.)
- AV1 codec support
- dav1d decoder enabled by default
- built with official speed optimizations
- increased number of autocomplete matches
- allow changing default download storage location
- do not ignore save prompt for users without SD cards
- disable articles and increase number of icons on new tab page
You can inspect all functionality/privacy changes by reading the patches and/or the CHANGELOG.
Flags which have been retired from upstream Chromium but are still available in Bromite.
#enable-horizontal-tab-switcher
#pull-to-refresh
Bromite's privacy features, including anti-fingerprinting mitigations (which are not comprehensive), are not to be considered useful for journalists and people living in countries with freedom limitations, please look at Tor Browser in such cases.
All built versions are available as releases; the official website points to those releases and - when browsing via Android - it will automatically select the one apt for your device (or none otherwise).
Each tag corresponds to a Chromium Stable release tag.
Bromite is currently built for ARM, ARM64 and x86 and for the Android SDK versions 19 and 21; Bromite SystemWebView is provided as well (SDK21+). For every Bromite build you can always find a matching vanilla Chromium build which is used for example to verify which issues are specific to Bromite or not.
All official releases are also available through the official third-party F-Droid repository.
You can verify the integrity of a downloaded APK file from this project with any sha256sum
-compatible tool by downloading the corresponding brm_X.Y.Z.sha256.txt
or chr_X.Y.Z.sha256.txt
file, where X.Y.Z is the release version number. Example:
$ sha256sum --check brm_68.0.3440.54.sha256.txt
arm64_SystemWebView.apk: OK
arm64_ChromePublic.apk: OK
arm64_ChromeModernPublic.apk: OK
You can verify authenticity, e.g. that the author (csagan5) released the file, by using gpg2:
$ gpg2 --quiet --verify brm_68.0.3440.54.sha256.txt.asc
gpg: assuming signed data in 'brm_68.0.3440.54.sha256.txt'
gpg: Signature made Sun 08 Jul 2018 04:22:52 PM CEST using RSA key ID D85DC0C5
gpg: Good signature from "csagan5 <[email protected]>"
You can download csagan5's public GnuPG key from here: csagan5.asc.
The Bromite main repository contains tags for each corresponding Chromium release (see https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git).
Please refer to official Chromium build documentation to get started on how to build Chromium; if you can build Chromium for Android, you can build Bromite.
The GN args used to build Bromite are available here: GN_ARGS.
The patches are to be applied second the order specified in the bromite_patches_list.txt
file (you can use git am
).
See upstream documentation: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/master/components/subresource_filter/FILTER_LIST_GENERATION.md
Bromite uses an unindexed filter file, which is periodically published at https://github.com/bromite/filters
- Chromium project and developers
- Iridium project for some patches
- ungoogled-chromium for some patches
- ungoogled-chromium-android for some patches
- GrapheneOS for some security patches
- Inox patchset for some patches (via ungoogled-chromium)
- Brave Browser for some patches
- Vadim Pleshkov for Bromite's logo
The patches published as part of the Bromite project are released under GNU GPL v3.