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Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, I don't think that is true. https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium
Confirm, just click and run a pre-built package. I recently downloaded Chromium 79 for Mac in order to debug an issue in Tesla's browser which is based on that. Neat.
> Much of what appears to be Chrome (or Chromium) functionality is, in truth, provided by servers in Google's data centers. These include bookmark synchronization, the safe-browsing feature, search suggestions, spell-checking, and more.
> On January 15, the Chromium blog carried this brief notice that, as of March 15, non-Chrome builds of Chromium would lose access to these APIs.
> Anticipating this, distributors are already wondering whether packaging Chromium is still worth the effort.
From a first read, I guessed it is time to install Firefox. However, I noticed that I: 1) don't sync bookmarks, 2) don't care for the safe-browsing feature (I understand it is the annoying message that a website is "not safe"?), 3) have my own spell-checking service. So what exactly is meant by "search suggestions"? Is Google actually disabling access to their search API? Why wouldn't this affect Firefox? Why would Google even consider doing this? And, I guess that 4) I can still use another search engine.
So, does anyone know what's hidden under "and more"? Because even if all the features from above were missing, I fail to see why this should result in Chromium being removed from distros. It's still a functional, reliable and very fast browser. I am additionally confused because Chromium without these features is more attractive to me than the current version.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re running a closed source operating system (or large parts of it are closed source) why would you be particularly concerned about your browser?
Your question doesn't make sense except from a very, very narrow ideological perspective. It's useful to have an Open Source browser since: - most of the standards that a browser implements are also open standards - if it's under a permissive license, you can port it to either your own device, or unsupported devices. - proprietary browsers are influenced by business goals to do untoward things with regard to privacy…
You can do that even if it's copylefted. What difference does it make? As long as it is free software you can do it.
There is a new trend emerging in computing with the advent of Machine learning and that is, it is no longer sufficient to have talent/knowledge/passion/amazing team to create something. You need very deep pockets too. I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for sp…
The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon so that they can build even more privacy invasive Alexa & friends device.
So yeah, in a way this an issue of money, but not because you can't afford GPUs & Data, but because you can't buy the right people
There is a new trend emerging in computing with the advent of Machine learning and that is, it is no longer sufficient to have talent/knowledge/passion/amazing team to create something. You need very deep pockets too. I've been waiting for a WebspeechAPI implementation in Firefox for many years now but the only reason why I don't think it's happening is because maybe Mozilla lacks the funds to train the models for sp…
Google has become too big as company and has to be broken up by anti-trust rules, along with many other FAANG companies that ballooned up in recent years. It's laughable that Microsoft was under anti-trust scrutiny when they were much smaller company. The Microsoft anti-trust situation created enough lanes for smaller companies at the time, like Google, Apple, etc. to gain traction. The situation is the same now, ant…
This isn't really the case with Chrome though - on Windows, I keep having my browser reset back to Edge with fullscreen ads, on macOS the default browser is Safari (and it keeps spamming me with notification advertisements to use it), on Android the default browser on most US devices is Samsung Browser...
It's hard to argue that Google is really abusing people to use Chrome when there's an uphill battle on every single popular platform for users to actually install it.
If Google is really pushing an inferior product, how will you argue for antitrust when the users need to go out of their way to use Chrome on pretty much every platform except ChromeOS? What's the equivalent antitrust argument here?
"Google doesn't want to freely give their server capacity to anyone for server-driven features" doesn't really make for a strong argument. How do we structure the argument here? "This browser is very popular so it needs to be taken away from its developers"?
I wish there was a true war, but unfortunately Chrome has too much domination, expect on Apple's ecosystem.
I'm completely unaware of how Google handle these decisions internally, but from the point of view of an outsider they are trying to optimize their resources and output as much as possible. If some service is not extremely successful and profitable, and it's being actively maintained, someone at Google will eventually suggest to move on to other stuff.
This article details the decisions of whether to include Chromium in several Linux distributions following Google’s announcement that it will be Limiting Private API availability in Chromium : https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-avail...