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Google Chrome isn't. Chromium is, but Chromium also tends to download 3rd party close-source blobs from online resources, like the one that turns on your microphone.

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If by "also tends" you mean "once, as a bug", then yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409

That's a disingenuous phrasing, though.

Based on the link you provided it looks like it's Opt-Out not Opt-In, so it's not really a bug so much as a "feature" that open source software shouldn't have but google wanted to sneak in. based on this link [0] it's pretty clear that they did this intentionally and only changed things after user outcry. I wouldn't call that a bug.

[0]https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435

Sounds like the opt-out tracking Mozilla put in, or the advertisement for that TV show it spammed which did stupid things to text. It would be nice to have a mainstream browser which didn't try to track, advertise to, or shove "telemetry" into users.

It wasn't an ad. It shut down before init if you hadn't manually set an about:config value telling it to run.

It was set up in a dumb way, but people also grossly misreported. The extension was "enabled" by default but did exactly nothing except shut itself down. The behavior was all disabled by default.

> It wasn't an ad.

Of course it was. It shilled a TV show.

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