Harden your browsers

We’ve usually been pretty impartial about which browser you should use, but we’re going to deviate from that slightly, at least for this feature. Chrome’s always been a slick browser, but all that Googleyness baked in makes us queasy. Chromium is a better option, being entirely open source, devoid of Flash and generally less dependent on Google services. It’s also easier to install than Chrome on most distros because of the rules about the latter’s redistribution.

However, a change crept into both and last year that made us more wary. That changed concerned the ‘Sign in to Chrome’ functionality, which connects the browser to your Google account and can optionally sync bookmarks, extensions and browsing history, this option was distinct from signing into Google services via their web pages – and this, we thought, was a good thing. But now, just signing into those services connects the whole browser with that account. We don’t have a problem with signing into Google or indeed any other browser-wide service, but that should be done explicitly by the user.