| SRWare Iron | |
|---|---|
 | |
 Iron 135.0.6850.0 onWindows 10 | |
| Developer | SRWare |
| Initial release | 18 September 2008; 17 years ago (2008-09-18)[1] |
| Stable release(s) | |
| Engine | Blink,V8 |
| Operating system | Windows 7 and later,OS X 10.9 and later,Linux,Android 4.1 and later |
| Size | 74.1 MB (Windows), 110 MB (Android) |
| Type | Web browser |
| Licence | BSD, with some parts under other licences.[6] Source code not provided. |
| Website | www |
SRWare Iron is aChromium-basedweb browser developed by theGerman company SRWare.[7] It primarily aims to eliminateusage tracking and other privacy-compromising functionality that theGoogle Chrome browser includes.[8] Iron ships with certain Chromium privacy options switched on by default, it provides some additional features that distinguish it from Google Chrome.[1][8]
Iron was first released as abeta version on 18 September 2008,[1] 16 days after Google Chrome's initial release.
On 26 May 2009 a Preview-Release (Pre-Alpha) of Iron came out forLinux.[9] And on 7 January 2010 a beta version formacOS was released.[10]
On 11 August 2010,Microsoft updated theBrowserChoice.eu website in order to include Iron as one of the possible choices.[11][12]
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, auser agent switcher, an extension system, integrated Adblocker and improved Linux support.[1] Support for Windows XP ended with version 50, but all older versions are still available.[13] With version 55.0.2900, control of WebRTC is taken over by an add-on.[14] Therefore, the "WebRTC disabled" builds are no longer available.[15]
The followingGoogle Chrome features are not present in Iron:[16][17][18]
Added features include:
In December 2014,Lifehacker said that Iron offers little that is not available by simply configuringGoogle Chrome's privacy settings.[27] However,the_simple_computer wrote that Iron removes theGoogle Native Client, Google's custom navigation and error pages and other similar features.[25]
In October 2014,the_simple_computer wrote that even though SRWare Iron released under the BSD licence, the latest source code publicly available at the time was incomplete and for version 6, even though the binaries were on version 14;[25] source code was moved toRapidShare in 2013, with external access blocked, effectively making the program "entirely closed source".[25] In the same year,Lifehacker wrote that SRWare had not released the browser's source code for years.[27] In 2015, SRWare temporarily resumed releasing the source code for the browser.[28]
