Full disclosure: I work on Chrome. Accepting that, I think it's pretty clear that Iron is scamware. It's just an outdated Chromium build with some hardcoded preferences and support for a text file of blocked URLs (something far better implemented by extensions). The creator makes money from ads on the homepage, default search provider, and install page. You can read a bit more background here:
Coincidentally, I recently poked at Iron to determine if it includes the security and stability fixes we merge for stable releases. So, I tried to get the source code to make the analysis easier. It turns out there's no repository, and I had to wait eight hours pulling 1GB of archives from Rapidshare. When I finally opened it I found a tarball from Chrome 6, which is almost two years old (even though Iron is obviously using Chrome 18). So, I don't think the creator is very concerned about keeping up pretenses (like being an open source project) anymore.
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
Coincidentally, I recently poked at Iron to determine if it includes the security and stability fixes we merge for stable releases. So, I tried to get the source code to make the analysis easier. It turns out there's no repository, and I had to wait eight hours pulling 1GB of archives from Rapidshare. When I finally opened it I found a tarball from Chrome 6, which is almost two years old (even though Iron is obviously using Chrome 18). So, I don't think the creator is very concerned about keeping up pretenses (like being an open source project) anymore.