Build from source

You never have to take our word for what's inside. Clearcote is designed to be rebuilt by anyone.

The shape of a build

A Clearcote build is upstream Chromium plus a transparent, ordered patch set:

Fetch ungoogled-chromium at the pinned revision (Chromium 149).
Prune the source, then apply the ungoogled patch set (de-Googling).
Apply the Clearcote patches (engine-level identity controls).
Drop in the public config/args.gn.
gn gen out/Default then ninja -C out/Default chrome.

bash

# high-level outline — see docs/BUILDING.md for the exact, pinned steps
git clone https://github.com/clearcotelabs/clearcote-browser
cd clearcote-browser

# the pipeline scripts fetch upstream, apply patches and configure the tree
./build.sh            # or run scripts/00..05 individually

# build the browser
ninja -C out/Default chrome

Windows, cross-compiled from Linux

The current target is Windows x64, cross-built on Linux with clang-cl / lld-link. This is genuinely involved (Windows SDK + CRT staging, toolchain shims), so every step and gotcha is written down to be reproducible.

Canonical guides

docs/BUILDING.md — full build-from-source guide.
docs/PATCHES.md — what each patch in the set does.
docs/RESEARCH-DOSSIER.md — deep cross-build notes.
config/args.gn — the public build configuration.

Because the patch set and config are public and pinned, a build you produce should match the published artifact's behavior — and you can diff the patches against pristine upstream to see every single change.