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Comment by ferbivore | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the semi-official Google position is that Widevine should have been impossible to disable all along [1]. Go figure.

[1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=615738...

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Honestly? It makes sense and I see nothing wrong with it.

Chrome is Google's opinionated version of Chromium, with the average user in mind.

Everyone else should be using Chromium. There's nothing wrong or lacking in it now that the PDF module has been open sourced. If one wants Flash or Widevine, those can be installed separately.

If by "everyone else" you mean 0.5% market share...

Well I don't know about 0.5%, but a small minority? Absolutely. Most people who interact with computers don't know how to use them. And out of the people who do know how to use it, an even smaller percentage would care about using Chromium over Chrome.

Is there a way to use a stable version of Chromium that automatically updates?

sudo pacman -S chromium. All decent distros ought to have it.

Thank you but I use Windows.

It's available in Chocolatey https://chocolatey.org/packages/chromium

Seeing you get downvoted for asking genuine questions to a technical community reminds me that I need to find a new one. Stack Overflow 2.0, here we come.

No question now what has happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.

> decent distros

This page [1] has an overview of everything you need to know about using Chromium as a day-to-day browser, including a section on auto-updaters [2].

[1]: https://chromium.woolyss.com/

[2]: https://chromium.woolyss.com/#updater

> with the average user in mind.

And what average user would have a need for there being no way to disable it?

The average user doesn't need to nor doesn't want to know about the existence of Widevine. And if he's told about it, he wouldn't care about it, he just wants to watch Netflix.

Talking about use cases when it comes to widely used software is a null argument in most contexts. It was previously disablable, preventing that now is just taking features away without a benefit. Its automatically enabled for all the people that don't know about it, but need it anyway.

You haven't answered the question. What user benefits from removing this feature?

This isn't for the benefit of any user, "average" or otherwise.

Users who don't understand it, disable it either accidentally, or based in bad advice, then don't know why Netflix doesn't work, probably in 2 years time when they long since forgot editing it.

As the years go by, I learn every config option is going to lead to some set of users getting confused and upset.

So some parties pushing hard for DRM has nothing to do with it, whatsoever? It's all about preemptively avoiding horrible user pain and incredible customer support costs, correct? Then explain the million options left over in chrome://flags/ ?

Oh, snap. Looks like that explanation doesn't even begin to make sense, and it's hilarious how the "average user", in their absence, gets used as an excuse to implement outright hostile things, but only then. When Google Reader shuts down or other things are done nobody likes, which not one person welcomes, that doesn't matter, it's only when it's about things no user wants but companies want to push when they suddenly do.

The bug report mentions real problems caused by this change. Are there similar reports about problems that were caused by that option being available, or is that all just theoretical?

> As the years go by, I learn every config option is going to lead to some set of users getting confused and upset.

So? Remove all config options, or simply do good work and let the remaining complainers complain? Why not take the person who filed the bug report and is "confused and upset" for very good reasons they can argue for more seriously than some random hypothetical person?

Then you put it somewhere that it can't be easily accessed by the unknowing. Which, IIRC, was already the case--there's no menu option for "chrome://plugins".

Making idiot-proofing your top design priority "for the user's own good" is a really bad idea that invariably results in a less functional product for no substantial benefit. If people are getting confused and messing with things they didn't mean to, the solution is better interface design, not axing useful features.

Just tell me where in Chromium to disable resetting user profile when it detects tampering - so I am able to migrate a profile just by copying and I will move to Chromium in a second.

The not being able to copy your profile between machines is terrible terrible decision. It detects "tampering" and nukes everything :(

I've not personally used this, but it should work for your use case.

http://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#Roaming...

(note that the 'roaming location' could still just be a folder on your local drive.)

> If you enable this setting, the settings stored in Google Chrome profiles like bookmarks, autofill data, passwords, etc. will also be written to a file stored in the Roaming user profile folder or a location specified by the Administrator through the Google Chrome policy.

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