Get [Rid of] Chromium

Another update to Chromium (not Chrome) web browser caused a final shift in our recommendations for this FOSS (Free Open Source Software). For a long while, Chromium has lacked a critical feature found in other FOSS browsers, such as Firefox and the Tor Browser (built on the code for Firefox). Chromium does not use a master password to secure your recorded site logins. Anyone who sits down at your computer can freely access this information.

Not so with Firefox, if they do not know your master password; plus your logins are not stored/copied anywhere else.

To add insult to purposeful injury, the newest edition of Chromium does not allow you to look at all login passwords at once (as in the past) and potentially back them up locally. You have to allow Google to store all your login information at Google's passwords site. If anyone learns/hacks your master password for that site, they gain access to all of that information. They do not need to sit directly at your computer or gain access to it.

How stupid is that?

And yet that is exactly what Google has done, because it wants to know (1) where you go in every way possible and (2) how you got there and what you do.

This is not the first time Google has manipulated the Chromium FOSS project, sometimes to be slapped for violating regulated FOSS licensing. There is no excuse—including convenience for the lazy—for seizing control of your security information. And yes, accounts at the google site for passwords have been hacked more that once.

Chromium was once a highly preferred FOSS browser at NDAS—but no more. It has been removed from all NDAS machines and the "Resources for Authors" page. We recommend that you delete it as well, delete all login information stored at passwords.google.com and switch to Firefox—or better, Waterfox—plus our recommended security plugins (see Resources for Authors >> Internet).