Windows only 
It’s always been interesting to watch which open source browser third-parties branch off of when they start offering up their own web surfing app. Up until recently Firefox was the popular choice mostly because it was, well, one of the only viable choices. Now that Google Chrome is on the scene and gaining market share that appears to be changing.
Many of you know Comodo because of their free firewall utility, and some may even be a proponent of their antivirus. Their newest creation, Comodo Dragon, is a Chrome-based web browser that doesn’t add much to the feature set already found in Chrome. I thought that maybe they’d make it interesting by having Comodo Dragon work hand-in-hand with some of their other products, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
I wanted to see how this differed from Chrome, and went looking around for details on what “privacy and security enhancements” there actually were. I couldn’t actually find details on the changes they’ve made other than that they have removed the tracking capabilities Google embeds in Chrome. Aside from that all I have to go off of are the bullets they provide:
- Has privacy enhancements that surpass those in Chromium’s technology
- Has Domain Validation technology that identifies and segregates superior SSL certificates from inferior ones
- Stops cookies and other Web spies
- Prevents all Browser download tracking to ensure your privacy
The browser itself feels exactly like Chrome… except for the (much) uglier skin. I guess what intrigued me was not that Comodo is offering a browser, but rather that they chose to go with Chrome as their starting point. I know their are some other spin-offs, such as ChromePlus, but if all Comodo was looking to do was make a branded browser they could have easily gone with Firefox as well. It may not mean much now, but if this turns into a trend we could see it affecting Firefox’s market share… which has already been rather stagnant since the release of Chrome.
Comodo Dragon Browser (Windows only; Freeware)
I know looks aren’t everything, but when the browser doesn’t offer anything better over the competition, why would anyone use this nasty looking one? Personally, I don’t care about the information that Google may be gathering about me. However, if I did care and didn’t want them tracking me, I would use Iron or ChromePlus rather than Comodo Dragon.
main reason i don’t use it is that it can’t use plugins.
We have been able to turn off Chrome’s tracking abilities with UnChrome ([abelssoft.net]) for quite some time. I doubt I will spend much time with Comodo’s browser as I like using the beta of Google Chrome so I can play with the latest features. Besides Google has done a good job of making the perpetual beta fairly stable. Maybe if they get some interesting differentiating features I will give it a try; but for now I will stick with Firefox with Google Chrome beta as a backup (especially now the Xmarks works in both and the addition of extensions to Chrome).
PS I also forgot another browser in this category Iron Browser as seen at [srware.net]
For most browsing, I use Firefox. The only thing for which I use Google Chrome or a spinoff of Chrome is its ability to open selected web pages in their own desktop windows as if they were separate applications. (Mozilla’s Prism, available as a Firefox add-on or a standalone beta product, does essentially the same thing. But Prism stupidly creates a separate “profile” folder with many duplicated files for each application. That’s a major waste of my scarce disk space.)
I have two problems with Chrome: It does not install its EXE file into “C:\Program Files” the way all other installed programs do, and its update installers provide absolutely no feedback when they run.
If it were not for these two oddities, I would not have any interest in Dragon or any other Chrome wannabe.
Dragon does not suffer from these two problems, but that’s about the only thing good I can say about it. It is crash-prone, especially with extensions installed (it accepts Chrome’s extensions).
In particular, it often posts a pop-up message that Flash Player has become “unresponsive”, even while I’m listening to an audio stream using the Flash Player. On other occasions, Flash will actually stop working for no discernible reason.
I have not encountered this problem with Google Chrome.
I had adopted Chrome and loved it until version 5 started taking 10 seconds to startup instead of the near instantaneous startup of version 4. (and Firefox and IE8 with 20 to 30 seconds).
Dragon is back to a near instantaneous startup – a big feature for the default browser, when following a link from an e-mail for example.
Love it! Don’t change it!