SRWare Iron Portable

Editors' ReviewDownload.com staffSeptember 27, 2017 Google Chrome is a strong contender in the raging browser wars, but it's not without its critics. Concerns have been raised about several aspects of Chrome that could potentially compromise user privacy. SRWare Iron Portable is a browser that's based on the Chromium source code and is nearly identical to Chrome, but it addresses several of these privacy concerns. Visually, SRWare Iron Portable is virtually indistinguishable from Chrome, and it functions just as Chrome does; it's sleek and speedy. We were unable to install Chrome extensions in Iron Portable, but this seems to be related to the fact that this is the portable version of the browser. Other than that, we noticed very few differences between Iron Portable and Chrome. There are seven privacy issues that Iron claims to address: the installation ID, the suggest feature, alternate error pages, error reporting, RLZ tracking, the Google updater, and the URL tracker. All of these features have been removed, which may or may not be problematic for you. RLZ tracking lets Google know when Chrome has been downloaded as part of a promotional package, and most users are unlikely to know or care about that. But if you like Chrome's predictive search terms, you're going to miss them in Iron, because they've been removed so that the browser does not communicate with Google as you're typing your search terms. The browser's online Help file is brief and not written in very good English. Overall, we think that SRWare Iron Portable is a good choice if you're interested in a portable browser that makes privacy one of its top concerns. SRWare Iron Portable comes as ZIP file. It is accessible after extraction with no need for installation.