He was the developer working on Bromite with csagan, and he was likely not the cause of the delays, since the builds on his repo have been keeping up with Chromium all year. I’ve been using it since Bromite stopped getting updates and it works really well. Brave was my second option because of the fingerprinting protection and adblocking, but they don’t disable JavaScript JIT like Bromite and now Cromite. User script support is also really handy for me

They meet the criteria for Privacy Guides, at the very least: https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/pull/1312

Yeah, that’s why I pointed out that I haven’t used it in a couple years, I have no idea about the direction development took after that, so maybe some folks that work on the development of Chromium and its many forks can give us some insight. Personally, I just decided to stick to Firefox tweaked with Arkenfox as my main browser on desktop and I have Brave with all its annoyances turned off as a backup option

I’ve been using ephemeral port forwarding on a Windscribe pro account, hope they keep the feature. It’s a pretty good service

Haven’t used Ungoogled Chromium in a couple years, but I’ve seen some criticisms of it even compared to regular Chrome: https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/

For my personal use, the only drawback of mat2 is that for PDFs it turns pages into PNGs (https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2/-/blob/master/libmat2/pdf.py), so you lose the OCR layer/searchable text from the original file. Since ExifTool changes to PDF metadata are reversible if you don’t linearize them (https://exiftool.org/TagNames/PDF.html), now I just use this script to safely clean and keep the output file searchable: https://gist.github.com/sneakers-the-rat/172e8679b824a3871decd262ed3f59c6.

I guess you could compare the output files from mat2 and ExifTool using the fc or diff commands, to find out what’s the difference