Chromium Hardening Guide

Content Blocking For starters, extensions are always bad. Especially MV2 extensions, like uBlock Origin. Since MV2 extensions can access any site as well as a great many features without permission. MV3 prevents this, but it isn't too much better since many extensions just ask for access to all sites anyway to work properly, but at least it offers the user control. With that in mind uBOL (uBlock Origin Lite) in Basic mode is pretty good, since it has no access to sites while still being able to deliver decent content-blocking. It also allows granting access to specific sites, such as Youtube (yes it works), for better filtering if needed. Other extensions and uBOL global modes risk security and weaken site isolation.

Hm? That adblocking extensions can intercept (any) network request on any site is by design. If you ignore the scriptlet injection and the cosmetic filtering, uBO is also a network request filtering engine, which allows you to precisely filter requests (like specific site while visiting certain domain) than DNS blocking could.

You have to put scary warnings on that capability because letting an extension intercept all requests is easily abused in the wrong hands, but that doesn't make this access bad.

The author goes on to say that filtering engines (not made by the Chromium team) patched into Chromium or Brave's in-browser blocking is better, but I don't understand why it matters where the content blocking code lives (outside of the author complaining about attack surface).

From the "Selecting a Browser" section:

Proprietary vs. Open-Source

Long story short, it makes no difference. Open-source is preferable for transparency reasons, but has little effect on anything in the baseline criteria.

Open source isn't a silver bullet by any means, but I can't imagine trusting a browser that isn't open source, whether from a privacy or security POV.

What's strange is that they seem to contradict themselves later in the article on this point:

It is proprietary, which isn't the worst, but it is difficult to analyze how good it really is, build-wise.

If "build quality" is one of the baseline factors but you can't confidently analyze the build quality of proprietary browsers, how does that not make a difference?

Also, I think a practical problem with recommending (vanilla) Chrome even if you are willing to trust it now (with custom configuration applied) is that the updates are kind of a double-edged sword; you will inevitably encounter new, untested, and potentially-problematic features as you update it, unless you want to wait for some third party to confirm that it's still okay or to update their configuration script before each update (and disable auto update), which defeats one of the main cited advantages of using Chrome, the fast updates.

In somewhat related news Gentoo has recently masked (disabled) the Chromium ebuild and it's currently going through last rites, the process before removal form the Portage tree. I can fully sympathize. I've given up on Chromium/Chrome a while ago for similar reasons. The ridiculous build times in particular.

From the package.mask message:

Increasingly challenging to maintain with increased release cadence, upstream toolchain changes, and conflicts between trying to provide a consistent experience for Gentoo users (avoiding bundled where possible) vs. getting updates out in a timely manner. Many unfixed vulnerabilities.

Keeping it in ::gentoo isn't a matter of just supplying an updated ebuild, but a commitment to keeping it up to date and finding a compromise between users' expectations (like various USE flags & not forcing all bundled components) and maintainability.

Some more details: https://bugs.gentoo.org/982204#c53

I think LWN might have a take on this too but I don't currently have a subscription.