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Need Multiple Chromium Profiles for Common Use Cases #221

Open shw700 opened 7 years ago

shw700 commented 7 years ago

There has been some recent discussion about how the Chromium Oz profile should be packaged by default. Discussion of the various respective merits and pitfalls of Chromium vs. Tor Browser aside, it is generally acknowledged that Chromium is a more suitable browser for encouraging a rich end user experience in the most common/non-critical web-based tasks.

The initial batch of considerations is threefold:

  1. Incognito mode or not?
  2. Allow user-installed browser extensions?
  3. Network communication via standard Tor pathway or through clearnet bridge?

There are several further conceivable questions down the road. One of them might be whether or not to enforce a more rigorous subset of seccomp policies for a "locked down" browser that wouldn't be as conducive to a richer user experience.

Right off the bat I see a couple of possible solutions:

  1. Multiple oz profiles corresponding to these various "modes" or permutations of settings
  2. Creation of a new prompting/chooser mechanism that allows for the definition of a single static Chromium oz profile, but prompts the user upon launch for their desired level of execution paranoia.

2 is a whole new can of worms.

1 might be a more appropriate immediate choice, even if just as a stopgap mechanism. The next question would be: how many profiles? 2 would be a minimum. In the most naive 2 profile setup I would propose:

a. Incognito, no extensions, Tor b. Incognito disabled, extensions allowed, clearnet

This is a topic ripe for much lengthier discussion, though... the chronion profile, for one.