What's the deal with Chromium on Linux? Google at odds with package maintainers | Hacker News Reader

What's the deal with Chromium on Linux? Google at odds with package maintainers

hackaday.com

29 pointsfanf212 comments

They could have let users define their own sync server. Instead they just opted to limit user choice and cripple users that wish to opt out of Google services but obtain similar functionality from services they host or from a third party.

This is how Google does things in Android too.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Glob...

Now that sync features will be closed source with no accountability, the potential for abuse for more data collection from users is high.

Anyone can modify chromium to use a different server, right? Google isn't the only one who can provide that code.

> In my head this is translating as “Google limits it’s own ability to snarf data from unofficial Chromium builds”

Right on. Why on earth is Google abandoning precious users to mine data from, especially when it's actually involving less effort than catering to Chrome users?

And why were these distro's (and their users) making the decision that they didn't want to use official Chrome, but would still use Google sync.

And even if it made sense for the users, Google made Chrome open source and this has spawned many great (and some awful) projects and allowed even Google haters to use it, but this shouldn't mean they are also forced to provide related services.

Support for 32-bit builds and native BSD builds? That's two factors mentioned in the linked-to Hackaday piece. Following the links also shows things like disabling "some of the more intrusive Google features."

Where did you get the idea that anyone thinks Google should be forced to support other browsers?

The Hackaday piece even says "Google is going to run their business as they see fit. If they think allowing unofficial builds of Chromium to tap into their cloud services such as Sync isn’t worth it, it’s their prerogative to block them."

The topic is more the annoyance that what had once been an official exception to the terms of service (which passed through legal and the VP level at Google) has not merely been rescinded, but treated as if it were never valid and its asserted mis-use "discovered" by an audit.

More likely it's to keep down the likes of Brave and Opera than Chromium on Linux/BSD, which are probably barely a blip by comparison.

If MS were smart, they'd open up their alternatives to the Chromium community. They've done such a good job at building goodwill the past few years, and would be a nice gesture.

FWIW, the thread at https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/NX... says:

> The Brave project has built a Sync server for their Chromium-based Brave browser: https://github.com/brave/go-sync and it is open source but uses Amazon Cloud for their database backend storage.

Cool... thanks, wasn't aware of this... guessing Opera may have done the same... in which case Google are just being kind of a-holes about it.

I like the blue icon more.

Also, only chromium is available in my distro's official repositories.

Couldn't care less what they do with Chromium. Don't want their phone-home trash anyway.

I'm pretty in the dark here since I don't have a google account, but what are these private APIs they're talking about? Is Google Sync the equivalent of Firefox Sync? If that doesn't work, but the actual browsing works, what's the big deal?

People should still be able to build Chromium and their Electron apps. It's not clear to me what people are getting worked up about... what am I missing?

I'm thinking that this could be an opportunity for the likes of Dropbox or Microsoft... Dropbox as it could be a natural gateway to branding and for both an opportunity for more goodwill.

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