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Bromite - Take back your browser

current Bromite release GNU GPL v3

Bromite

Bromite is a Chromium fork with support for ad blocking and enhanced privacy.

Bromite is only available for Android Lollipop (v5.0, API level 21) and above.

downloads on Github

For the Frequently Asked Questions see F.A.Q..

For documentation see the wiki.

Goals

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".

Donate

Please donate to support development of Bromite and the costs for the build system.

→ Support development with a donation: paypal

BTC donations address: bc1qmpyuqsvs3tz3uaysplmwjr33gg4rzu6cqweaq834ehc25vduxppqkrszel

ETH donations address: 0xf47ff39223d828f99fec5ab53bd068c5c0522042

Features

  • customizable adblock filters via user-provided URL (see https://www.bromite.org/custom-filters)
  • remove click-tracking and AMP from search results
  • DNS-over-HTTPS support with any valid IETF DoH endpoint
  • always-incognito mode
  • disable all field trials permanently
  • disable smart search by default, allow web search from incognito mode
  • always-visible cookies, javascript and ads site settings
  • remove Play integration binary blobs
  • use CFI on all architectures except x86
  • disable media router and remoting by default
  • disable dynamic module loading
  • show warnings for TLSv1.0/TLSv1.1 pages
  • enable site-per-process isolation for all devices with memory > 1GB
  • completely remove safe browsing and other privacy-unfriendly features
  • proxy configuration page with PAC and custom proxy lists support
  • settings to disable custom intents and clear session on exit
  • flags to toggle anti-fingerprinting mitigations for canvas, audio, client rects, webGL and sensor APIs (see full list below for all the new flags)
  • use frozen 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
  • disable scroll-to-text-fragment
  • reduced referer granularity
  • block gateway attacks via websockets

Features not related to privacy

  • import/export bookmarks
  • bookmark all tabs from tabs regroup menu
  • flag to allow screenshots of incognito tabs
  • 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
  • increase number of autocomplete matches from 5 to 10
  • 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
  • adding an URL as bookmark will clear its blocked status for the NTP tiles
  • history support in incognito mode
  • view source of pages
  • timezone customization
  • sticky desktop mode setting
  • disable video autoplay by default
  • mobile/desktop user agent customization

You can inspect all functionality/privacy changes by reading the patches and/or the CHANGELOG.

Flags

Flags which have been retired from upstream Chromium but are still available in Bromite.

  • #enable-horizontal-tab-switcher
  • #pull-to-refresh
  • #enable-search-ready-omnibox
  • #darken-websites-checkbox-in-themes-setting
  • #simplified-ntp
  • #enable-text-fragment-anchor
  • #num-raster-threads

New flags:

  • #enable-incognito-snapshots-in-android-recents
  • #max-connections-per-host
  • #resume-background-video
  • #ipv6-probing
  • #disable-webgl
  • #enable-device-motion and #enable-device-orientation
  • #show-legacy-tls-warnings

Privacy limitations

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.

Releases

All built versions are available as releases; the official website points to those releases and - when browsing via Android - it will automatically highlight 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.

Integrity and authenticity

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.

How to build

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 Chromium version tag used as base for the patches is available here: RELEASE; this is always corresponding to the git tag for every release. 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).

How to build the filters

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

Contributing

Please submit issues following the issue template; beware that GitHub does not display the templates from mobile.

Patches are welcome and accepted if they match the project goals.

For any usage or development discussion please use GitHub Discussions: https://github.com/bromite/bromite/discussions

Credits

Filters credits

The URLs of the lists used are available at: https://github.com/bromite/filters/blob/master/lists.txt

License

The patches published as part of the Bromite project are released under GNU GPL v3.