[Android Apps and Games] nochromo:
Once upon a time the lord Google releaseth teh Chrome, and the people marvelled in great wonder. Never before could they partake in so many internets in so little time.

Yet even then, the ceiling of lolcats/hour was quickly reached, for the pages were blinky and full of distractions, and the leeching of bandwidth delayed any reactions. Viagra! Cialis! Which button to button to download the download? What happened next will amaze you.

Reinforcements arrived in the form of extensions, blocking ads and performing malware prevention. Alas, as usual the exploits of the big and resourceful are no help at all to the friend in your hand.

Solutions abound. Proxies. Jailbreaks. None sanctioned by the ever-controlling and -vengeful bohemoth.

Here I present you with yet a different take on the problem, because I love you internet... #NoChromo

Err, what?

Right! This is nothing more than a modified build of Chromium (which recently saw a lot of sources from Chrome for Android added). It offers some built-in ad- and malware-blocking.

Note that it doesn't attempt any hiding of ad-sections, so you may be presented with blocks of empty space (or containing errors).

This is not a port of any existing ad-blocking plugin for 'grown-up' Chrome, it's just a quick reimagining of some of the parts. Sooner or later Chrome for Android will get extension support for a truly proper adblocker, I hope sooner.

FAQ

Reimagining?

It's coded in C++ and compiled directly into Chromium (a handful of ms per request, total memory use about 3mb), but it only covers URL manipulation at this time. It doesn't modify page content (remove/hide ad blocks), nor does it keep track of the type of request (some ad blockers do this for improved blocking).

vs hosts-based blocking, AdBlock Plus, uBlock?

Resource-wise it's as lean as host-based blocking, but its blocking is much finer grained than hosts-based, and doesn't require root. It does still lose from (desktop) ABP and uBlock in ad-blocking capacity, but uBlock isn't available on Android and I'm not a fan of ABP's methods (neither the technique of their Android solution nor their philosophy). So I'd put it squarely in the middle between hosts-based and the better known extensions.

What are the drawbacks?

Google did state the current Android source for Chromium is missing some codecs and other proprietary stuff. I haven't run into anything major, but you certainly might.

Will you support this?

Not officially, no. I built this for me, and it works on the sites I frequent. I'm just sharing it here so you can use it if you want to, or not if you don't. I may update it to newer sources once every while, or I might not. If it doesn't work for you on some site, just open it with regular Chrome.

That being said, it seems the Chromium source is not updated all that often, so if I update this once every few months you still wont be far behind. Not to mention that the sauce for my modifications are actually in the download folder, so you could build your own update if you wanted to.

And you are?

A dev from here on XDA who doesn't want his main account publicly associated with this, because I don't want to deal with possible retaliation from Google. Some of the site leadership know who I am, though. If this were malware, they'd take it down instead and tell everyone. If you don't want to trust me, sauce is available. If you can guess or know who I am, kindly STFU.

Download

Behold the glorious download links, for they are shiny and full of Chrome.

v51.0.2695.0 @ MEGA

ef337bce4e06b50d7c551f9940a9361f NoChromo-arm32-v51.0.2695.0.apk
d16bc732ae9b89bb50e3ba4ea421842d NoChromo-arm64-v51.0.2695.0.apk
4b28f614acb2f7e3e5d87502eeb621d9 NoChromo-mips32-v51.0.2695.0.apk
c2ec836cb94e18caaa905d88067b1322 NoChromo-x64-v51.0.2695.0.apk
bb440a9a582ac00d9ad9dd55ca49cb6c NoChromo-x86-v51.0.2695.0.apk
be3a25f8f52992df313881e186c5403d sauce-v51.0.2695.0.zip

(mips64 version does not currently build)

(Mirrors welcome, but please make sure to list the exact version numbers as stated here!)

The arm64 version is also available from the XDA Labs app!

Credits

Chromium contributors

AdBlock Plus

uBlock

EasyList and EasyPrivacy

MalwareDomains

Peter Lowe's Adservers

Changelogs

2016.04.05 - v51.0.2695.0

2015.06.09 - v45.0.2420.0-2