Address bar and privacy

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glider
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Feb 05, 2013 9:44 pm

Address bar and privacy

Post by glider »

I have just downloaded version 24.0.1350.0 (177594) from the arch linux AUR (iron-bin) because this browser is stated to be a privacy-improved version of chrome (/ium).

The webpage SRWare.net literally states, among others, the following iron improvement with respect to chrome:

Alternate Error Pages
Depending on the configuration, if you have typed a false address in the adress bar, this is sent to Google and you get an error message from Google's servers.
does not exist in Iron

Whereas the other 'improvements' are less easy to check, this one is child play. Let us check what happens when one pastes a wrong URL or word in the address bar, for example foo.bar: this will cause iron to perform a google search on foo.bar!
http://www.google.com/search?q=foo.bar& ... e&ie=UTF-8
The same happens when typing a word in the address bar. apparently the address bar doubles as a search toolbar, one from google to be precise, sending the typed string straight to Google's server against what is advertised above.

The expected behaviour based on the advertisement would be the generation of a dns error. Such an error does occur when typing http:// before the site location so that it becomes a full URL. Expecting everybody to type http:// before all locations without error in order for the privacy 'enhancement' to work seems unreasonable. In my opinion, either the search feature or the 'Alternate error page' privacy improvement advertisemant should be removed since this is misleading.

Hopefully the other privacy improvements do work as advertised.
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