7 KiB
Bromite - Take back your browser
Bromite is Chromium plus some patches for ad blocking and enhanced privacy.
Bromite is only available for Android v4.1 and above.
See open issues for the development in progress.
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 of 3 EUR: 
Support development with a free amount donation:
BTC donations address: 3MkC3idL61npQSCxL1gceksmRTkNkiCPcG
ETH donations address: 0xf47ff39223d828f99fec5ab53bd068c5c0522042
F.A.Q.
Does Google Sync/Translate/Data saver work?
No. This is not a limitation of Bromite but of all Chromium-based projects in general, as general public is not allowed to use Google's APIs for free unless when using Chrome.
Does Bromite require root?
No.
What is the SystemWebView?
It is the core component of Android for all web page visualizations. For example when you access a new wifi network and need to activate it, that is using the SystemWebView. If you do not know what it is then you do not need to install it.
How to enable DNS-over-HTTPS?
See this wiki page.
Can you add dark mode/some cool themes?
No. Bromite is about adblocking and privacy.
Can you add HTTPS everywhere?
No. We cannot add add-ons to Bromite (merely some features) and anyway HTTPS everywhere in particular is too invasive to be easily maintained across new releases.
Is Bromite on Play Store?
No, and this is unlikely to change. The Play Store would not allow total freedom on the adblocking choice, amongst other limitations.
Is Bromite on F-Droid?
No and there are no plans to support it; but feel free to submit it yourself.
Does Bromite support WebRTC?
No, it is not built-in.
Features
- baked-in adblock engine with filters from EasyList, EasyPrivacy and others
- remove click-tracking and AMP from search results
- DNS-over-HTTPS support via Google/CloudFlare servers
- allow playing videos in background
- StartPage, DuckDuckGo and Qwant search engines
- privacy enhancement patches from Iridium, Inox patchset, Brave and ungoogled-chromium projects
- webRTC, canvas, audio and other anti-fingerprinting mitigations
- all codecs included (proprietary, open H.264 etc.)
- built with official speed optimizations
You can inspect all functionality/privacy changes by reading the patches: https://github.com/bromite/bromite/tree/master/patches
Releases
All built versions are available as releases; the official website points to those releases and - when browsing via Android - it will automatically select the one apt for your device.
Each tag corresponds to a Chromium Stable release tag.
Bromite is currently built for ARM, ARM64 and x86 and for the Android SDKs versions 16 and 21 Additionally, SystemWebView, Monochrome and the vanilla Chromium builds are provided.
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
arm64_MonochromePublic.apk: OK
If you prefer an UI-based tool, you might want to look into GtkHash.
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 <32685696+csagan5@users.noreply.github.com>"
You can download csagan5's public GnuPG key from here: csagan5.asc.
NOTE: releases before v68 did not have published signed hashes files.
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.
Credits
- Chromium project and developers
- Iridium project for some patches
- ungoogled-chromium for some patches
- Inox patchset for some patches (via ungoogled-chromium)
- Brave Browser for some patches
- nochromo for the original adblock patch
- AdBlock Plus, uBlock Origin, Peter Lowe's adservers list, EasyList and EasyPrivacy for the filters included
License
The patches published as part of the Bromite project are released under GNU GPL v3.