SRWare Iron - Chrome Without The Google Updater Crap


I installed Google Chrome once way back when it was brand new back in September 2008. It was impressively fast, and the thing I liked best about it was the address bar. Once you start typing in the the address bar, the browser searches your bookmarks and history for what you're looking for and almost every time, the browser gets it right. Then you just hit "Enter", and off you go to where you want. Though Firefox 3 has a similar feature, but with Firefox 3, you can't just hit "Enter" after the search because the results are shown below the address bar in a dropdown menu. So you have to either hit the down arrow key or the "Tab" key once before hitting "Enter" to go to the first result of the search. With Chrome, the first result of the search is shown inside the address bar itself, that's why you can just hit "Enter" right away.

But Chrome's primary weakness was it's lack of extensions. As a power user, you need extensions to make the browser you're using and the page you're visiting to work for you the way you want to. So after using it for a few days, I went back to Firefox. From my short experience with Chrome, the one thing I hated most about it was the fact that it installed Google Updater on my computer and they made it very hard to get rid of it. It's designed to always run in the background and check for updates for any of Google desktop applications you have on your machine. I don't like softwares that loads on startup and check for updates without my explicit permission. And this reason alone have made me stay away from Chrome, that is, until recently.

I was browsing through reddit and saw a story that says google has made the Google Updater open source. I thought if this is the case, then there might be a way to install Chrome without intsalling Google Updater. So I put forth the question in the comments section and got a reply linking me to a Lifehacker story on how to do just that, but only it didn't. The story shows where to get the standalone version of Chrome that installs Chrome directly. You see, if you download Chrome from its official site, you are actually downloading Google Updater, and then the Google Updater downloads Chrome and installs it. However, the Lifehacker story fails to mention that even if you install the standalone version, googleupdater.exe still gets installed on your system as it comes as part of Chrome itself. The purpose of the Lifehacker story is more about helping users with non-existent or slow internet connection get Chrome installed on their machine. The standalone version can be installed on any machine without requiring an internet connection whereas if you downloaded it from the official site, you're actually downloading Google Updater and if you run that thing you downloaded an a machine that has no internet connection, then you won't be able to get Chrome installed.

So, for those who want to install Chrome without having googleupdater.exe installed with it, the Lifehacker story was completely useless, or so it seems. This is where Web2.0 comes and saves the day. Browsing through the comments for the Lifehacker story, a reader commented that there's this thing called SRWare Iron. As it turns out, SRWare Iron is exactly what I've been looking for-a stripped down version of Chrome without any of the Google Updater crap.

I tried it out and it works as advertised. I'm not really going to use it as my primary browser. I'm working on a new project right now and I need to see the whether the web-based project works on the WebKit engine. My choices were either Safari or Chrome, but instead I found something better - Iron.

0 comments: