Developer(s) SRWare Engine Blink, V8 | Development status Active | |
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Initial release 18 September 2008; 8 years ago (2008-09-18) Stable release Windows56.0.2950.1 (February 26, 2017; 28 days ago (2017-02-26)) [±]macOS56.0.2950.0 (February 13, 2017; 41 days ago (2017-02-13)) [±]Linux56.2950.0 (February 11, 2017; 43 days ago (2017-02-11)) [±] Operating system | ||
SRWare Iron is a free web browser, and an implementation of Chromium by SRWare of Germany. It primarily aims to eliminate usage tracking and other privacy-compromising functionality that the Google Chrome browser includes. While Iron does not provide extra privacy compared to Chromium after proper settings are altered in the latter, it does implement some additional features that distinguish it from Google Chrome, such as built-in ad blocking.
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Although SRWare has been claiming "Iron is free and OpenSource", this wasn't true from at least version 6 on until mid 2015, as the links given by them for the source code were hosted in RapidShare and blocked by the uploader. SRWare Iron "is entirely closed source and has been since at least version 6". According to lifehacker, as of October 2014 SRWare Iron was "supposedly open source but haven't released their source for years and the browser doesn't really offer much you can't get by tightening down Chrome's own privacy features on your own". In 2015, the developer of SRWare Iron, after years of not releasing the source code of their browser anymore, started again to release what they claim is the source code for the browser, although not stating on their page what version the source code is from.
On 11 August 2010, Microsoft updated the BrowserChoice.eu website in order to include Iron as one of the possible choices. As of December 2014 BrowserChoice.eu's website is offline, as the court order requiring Microsoft to post alternative browsers expired.
Development history
Iron was first released as a beta version on 18 September 2008, 16 days after Google Chrome's initial release.
On 26 May 2009 a Preview-Release (Pre-Alpha) of Iron came out for Linux. And on 7 January 2010 a beta version for macOS was released.
More recent versions of Iron have been released since then, which has gained the features of the underlying Chromium codebase, including Google Chrome theme support, a user agent switcher, an extension system, integrated Adblocker and improved Linux support.
Differences from Chrome
The following Google Chrome features are not present in Iron:
Criticism
According to Lifehacker, Iron doesn't really offer much you can't get by configuring Google Chrome's privacy settings. According to others, it is scamware or scareware, since the developers bring up non-existent issues about Chrome to claim Iron solves it.
Also, the download page claims the software is open source, but the source code was not available for many years. According to developers in 2014, due to the lack of published source code, "SRWare Iron is entirely closed source and has been since at least version 6". Since 2015 the source code for the browser has been again made available.