> they mean, as an alternative to Chrome, which is undoubtedly less open then Firefox

Chromium is just as open as Firefox.

I would bet quite a lot that most of their readers are using Chrome and not Chromium.

Chromium still comes with lots of googly bits

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

This looks great. Why isn't it available on debian via apt? It seems strongly aligned with debian's values.