ungoogled-chromium VS ProtonMail Web Client

Cromite[0] is the best on Android, it's a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium.

Cromite has a desktop build, but it's a bit more experimental than the mobile build, so you can use Ungoogled Chromium[1] instead. Ungoogled is also a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium. Check the beta flags to enable some more interesting features like getClientRect anti-fingerprinting measures (unfortunately breaks some React-based sites that go into infinite re-render loop).

Both of these browsers selectively include patches from Brave, but they are community-oriented builds so imo more trustworthy than Brave, which continues to package various shady anti-features and always will because it's backed by a for-profit company.

LibreWolf[2] is the nicest Firefox-based one for desktop, I think. It's pretty hardcore, though, I most only use it to visit mainstream social media sites.

I tried a bunch of the Firefox-based ones on mobile and none of them clicked for me. Cromite is just too slick on Android. Put the address bar at the bottom and off you go. Only downside is no online syncing of tabs and bookmarks, but meh. You can save all open tabs to bookmark bar in one hit then export your bookmarks, send the file through whatever E2EE channel you want to your other device and import then reopen them again.

[0] https://github.com/uazo/cromite

[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

[2] https://librewolf.net/

For those that like Chromium but want to remove any integration with Google, there's Ungoogled Chromium

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

If you're entirely partial to Chromium browsers, use Ungoogled Chrome https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

what about https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Firefox or Ungoogled Chromium (needs to update uBlock manually) in Incognito window with unchanged vanilla uBlock Origin with lists updated and no other plugins and without YouTube account. Works perfectly. Also FreeTube.

Ungoogled Chromium is a Chromium-based browser with Google services stripped out.

- Project and source: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

- Binaries: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...

Using these sort of downstream patch set browsers is rarely a good idea. If it has multiple full-time developers from a respected org dedicated to it, then it can be justifiable (Tor Browser, Brave), but take a look at the gaps in time for these two pages:

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/rel...

https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/c/ch...

There's often days you're going without security patches. If you want a browser without Google tracking, Firefox is a much better choice.

While these screenshots use Google Chrome, they will also work on all 'Chromium' based web browsers, like Brave, Vivaldi, ungoogled-chromium, etc. Window's Edge is also compatible, though some the button locations are changed.

I would highly recommend the Ungoogled Chromium fork instead: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Entirely volunteer maintained, there is no for-profit entity behind it looking to do crypto referrals or ad swapping or anything like that.

> Is this password-derived key the "account key" which I see in the Proton Mail settings interface?

No, the account key is an OpenPGP key which is encrypted with a key derived from your password. The "key encryption key" is not separately visible. The address keys are in turn encrypted using the account key.

> Please clarify what key derivation function is being used.

We use bcrypt, in addition to the OpenPGP S2K (i.e. the bcrypt output is fed as the "password" to OpenPGP's key encryption).

We are in the process of rolling out OpenPGP.js v6, which supports Argon2 for the OpenPGP S2K step, after which we'll start using that - but we aren't quite yet.

> Are there instructions for verifying that all this is happening? I think a lot of folks on HN won't be convinced otherwise.

Take a look at https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/blob/main/packages/..., for example. Though to be honest, if you want to verify that we aren't sending the password to the server anywhere, in principle you'd have to check the code of the entire web app. It's all open source, but it's a lot of work, of course. But you can also check the latest audit report: https://proton.me/blog/security-audit. They also verified all of this stuff.

> It's just that I'm going to create an OpenPGP identity for things like signing code commits on git, signing packages I publish. (...) So I was really hoping to be able to use Proton Mail with this identity instead of the key pair that's generated for the account.

Yeah, I understand. Though, the typical advice from a cryptographer's perspective would be, it's better to use separate keys for separate purposes; and the simplest way to do that is to generate separate OpenPGP certificates, so that's what we'd generally recommend. But, if you want to generate separate subkeys and sign them all using a common primary key, that's also reasonable enough. And, we can improve the documentation on that, although it's a bit of a niche use case (not for HN of course, but for the general audience it is).

> Thanks for reaching out here on HN. I've been a really happy Proton Mail customer and now I'm even happier.

Thanks, glad to hear! :)

The source code is here https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients

> Finally, in keeping with our long track record of transparency, Proton Pass is open source so anyone can review and verify our security architecture

They sure do enjoy writing that sentence without including any hyperlinks. This (https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/main/applicati...) appears to be the browser extension and https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/main/packages/... appears to look like the backend referenced in the extension's readme, but that directory's readme is zero bytes so (shrug)

Fork the frontend and make your own lightweight option

PS: I hope that we selfhosters will have a modern, efficient, easy to use mail suite one day with modern features like JMAP, good self-learning spam integration, automated checks and validations for SPF/DMARC/DKIM or whether the IP/host suddenly appears in a blocklist and integrated encryption at rest for emails. Something that isn't 30 services in a container image, with 30 different configuration styles. Maybe even with an API integrated that's compatible to the ProtonMail frontend (like the neutron server once intended to be). Anyway, I'm sorry for dreaming. ;)

And if you want to customize it further you can use Stylus to add custom CSS, Tampermonkey to add JS, or even modify the whole thing yourself from source (if you run it locally it syncs with your actual account).