Summary: I downloaded the
recently released source code for the "privacy-oriented" Iron 4 browser and compared it to the open source Chromium browser from which it was derived. I found that all Iron does is hard-code three privacy options, that were already user-configurable, and add one or two minor features unrelated to privacy, like increasing the number of thumbnails on the New Tab page. Looking back through the Chromium source code repository, those three user-configurable privacy options have been available since the first public release of Chrome, suggesting
there was likely never any rationale for Iron, as one of the main linux Chromium developers has pointed out. I got the idea to sic a patent troll, that has sued Google over Chromium, on the SRWare Iron devs and have notified the patent troll of the potential patent infringement.
I had downloaded the source for Iron 3 last December to see what it actually did. When I diffed the main git chromium repo against Iron 3 and removed all the lines that simply replaced the word Chrome with Iron,
this is all that was left. I decided to wait for the next source release for Iron 4 and compare it to the full Chromium codebase. Well, they finally released that source and this is
the full diff against Chromium. It seems long but start skimming it and you'll notice that it consists of the same comments, not code, trivially modified over and over again. Once you remove all the chaff, consisting of trivial comment modifications and lines that change the word Chrome to Iron or replace Google URLs with the srware equivalent,
this is all that's left.
Let's go through what it actually does. First, it disables some purely local logs and safeguards, that are completely irrelevant to privacy. Then, it changes the Chromium version number from 5.0.306 to 4.0.280, likely only to evade source analysis like I'm doing. Next, it manually disables the Google suggestion service, that suggests possible words when you start typing into the address bar, which can easily be turned off in the Options menu also. The number of thumbnails in the New Tab page is increased from 8 to 12 and the number of days of history used to compile that data is increased from 90 to 180. The Chromium tips that are shown on the New Tab page to help users learn how to use Chromium are disabled. The dialog that Chromium shows new users when it is first run is disabled. A service called GoogleURLTracker,
which is only used to figure out what international google domain, like google.co.uk or google.es, is the best one to forward search queries to, is disabled
for no real reason.
Chromium's built-in statistics recording and reporting functionality is shut off, even though the reporting that would be sent to Google is already user-configurable. The Client ID of the browser is wiped out. Google's alternate error pages, another user-configurable option, is removed. The About Chrome menu option in the browser is modified to remove some version information. The Options menu is modified to remove four items: you can no longer choose to enable or disable alternate error pages, Google's suggestion service, or the reporting of usage stats and crash reports to Google. Those three options have all been removed and the functionality disabled for you, so you don't get to choose what you want. The fourth item removed is a link to Google's website to learn more about their various privacy options.
Finally, a web resource service used to fetch new help tips for Chromium (whose display was disabled earlier) is also disabled, so that Chromium doesn't even fetch the tips. Finish off by including a few irrelevant header files and that's it, that's the big "privacy fork" of Chromium. Manually disable three user-configurable options and then remove the options from the Options menu, add minor tweaks like changing the New Tab page to 12 thumbnails, change the word Chromium to Iron everywhere, then add a bunch of spurious comment modifications (which will not affect how the program runs at all) to try and hide how little was changed, and you have Iron.
I went back and looked at the source code repository to find if those three privacy options were always included, and I found that
all three were included before the initial release of Chrome in September 2008,
though the Google suggestion preference was in a different section of the Options before. This implies that Iron has always been a scam, though I haven't looked at the source for Iron 1 and 2 to make sure there wasn't
anything worthwhile in there. Based on this source code analysis, Iron is mostly a scam today.
I did get an idea while going through the code for Iron though. I had heard that
a patent troll had sued Google and even gone after
some open source projects just for hosting the Chromium source. I suspected that Iron also used the same allegedly patent-infringing code and indeed it was also included in the Iron source code, though that's no guarantee that it was compiled into the executable. I have notified the patent troll of the potential infringement, let us see what they do. While I'm against software patents, or patents of any kind, if a patent troll is going to go after anyone, might as well sic him on a scammer. ;)
I have no formal affiliation with Google or Chromium. My only connection is some informal talks with a few Chromium developers, about mostly technical matters completely unrelated to Iron, when I ported Chromium to Unix.