The endless browser wars
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The term "browser wars" typically refers to Microsoft's attempts to dominate the World Wide Web with its Internet Explorer browser in the 1990s. That effort was thwarted by antitrust efforts and the rise of the free browser now known as Firefox; ever since, the web has been defined by free software. Or so some may have thought. In the 2020s, the browser wars continue with the growing dominance of Chrome and, it would seem, the imminent removal of Chromium from many Linux distributions.
Chrome, of course, is Google's proprietary browser, bundled with Android and widely installed on other systems as well. The Chrome browser, though, is built on top of Chromium, which is an open-source project; in theory, anybody can build Chromium and get a browser of nearly equal capability, minus perhaps some proprietary DRM modules. In practice, Chromium users are a tiny fraction of the browser-using population, while Chrome becomes increasingly dominant. Current estimates suggest that 60-70% of web users are running on Chrome.
Chromium users do exist, though, and many Linux distributions package a version of the Chromium browser; it's a way to deal with the increasing number of "only works on Chrome" web sites without having to run proprietary code.
Or so it seems. 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. These features are not part of Chromium, but Google has long provided API keys for distributors of Chromium builds to use, ensuring that Chromium users had equal access to them.
That era is coming to an end, though. 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. The loss of the bookmark-synchronization API, in particular, has drawn a fair amount of attention, but there are quite a few others that, it seems, will be restricted as well. After that date, users wanting to use those features will have to run Chrome to do so.
In other words, as of March 15, Chromium-based browsers will become rather
less capable than they were the day before; this will reduce the value of
Chromium to many of its users. Some of them will certainly throw in the
towel and just install Chrome instead. Anticipating this, distributors are
already wondering whether packaging Chromium (evidently not the easiest of
tasks) is still worth the effort. Longtime Fedora developer Tom Callaway,
for example, posted a Twitter
thread in which he said: "I am seriously reconsidering whether
there is any value in a crippled version of Chromium remaining in
Fedora/EPEL
".
This concern goes far beyond Fedora. The openSUSE community is currently discussing whether shipping Chromium still makes sense. The Arch Linux Chromium maintainer has stated his intent to drop the package if Chromium cannot be made to work with services like synchronization. Eric Hameleers, who provides Chromium packages for Slackware, doesn't want to continue if this change causes users to switch to something else. And so on.
There is, of course, an alternative to dropping Chromium that Callaway
hinted at: "The official Chrome API keys which will permit this usage
have been known since 2013 (they're embedded in every Chrome binary). It
would be terrible if everyone used them instead.
" Taking that
approach has been discussed on some distribution lists, but it seems
unlikely that anybody will try it. It is an uncertain path, in that Google
could invalidate the keys — though that would involve force-upgrading a lot
of Chrome users. But it's even more uncertain in a legal sense; there are
likely to be few volunteers to find out how Google would respond to such a
move among the established distributors.
The unhappiness emanating from Chromium users who are about to lose features is understandable. But this move on Google's part is just highlighting a situation that has existed for years already: you might use Chromium as a way of avoiding proprietary software, but if you use Chromium with features like synchronization, that objective has not been met. Chromium has taken a path similar to Android's; there is a core built with free software, but getting its full functionality requires accepting layers of proprietary code on top of it. The fact that said code is running on a remote server somewhere does not really change that situation.
Many of us run free software — and avoid proprietary software — because we want to remain in control of our systems. Free software can be counted on to not disappear at inopportune times; proprietary software works at the whim of its owner and has no such guarantee. The stripping of functionality from Chromium builds is just another example of an owner indulging a whim and taking away features that they no longer wish to make available.
Meanwhile, smug Firefox users are able to use Firefox Sync with no impending interruption in service. It is worth noting that this service, too, could be withdrawn at any time, but Firefox at least allows the use of alternative servers, so concerned users need not be dependent on the continued existence and good will of Mozilla. The server-side code is available for anybody wanting to take that approach.
The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. The creators of web sites have responded by not caring about Firefox; having to retry broken web sites in Chrome is a ritual that many Firefox users have had to get used to. It's not surprising that users give up and just run Chrome from the outset.
This is not a great trajectory. A lot of effort went into wresting the web
from a proprietary browser; we should really know better than to allow
ourselves to get into that situation again. Ironically, Google might have
helped in this regard by stripping some non-free components from Chromium;
users will now be more aware of their exposure and might just be more
motivated to
support a free alternative. That all depends on fully free browsers
remaining viable, though, and that is unlikely to happen if we all just
give up and run Chrome.
(Log in to post comments)
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 18:14 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 18:25 UTC (Mon) by ju3Ceemi (subscriber, #102464) [Link]
All those features are linked to, as the blog posted, "their Google Account", obviously people know that they are related to Google
Also, removing that package from the distribution will force people in google's hand : if I cannot get a browser from the distribution I trust, what should I do ? Get it from google, or from whatever dark and unknown website I found on the internet ?
I bet removing those features won't have a huge impact on users.
Removing the packages will.
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 18:56 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
Then you are the person who gets every 'bug' report about bookmarks, etc not working. People see bugzilla or your email address as tech-support and use it wanting to know why they can't connect to google for this that or the other.
All in all, this is not a package that endears itself to the packagers or the operating system. Its whole goal is to say 'see we have the source code and you can make it do something.. but you probably don't want to do that and will use our compiled one instead.'
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 19:09 UTC (Mon) by andy_shev (subscriber, #75870) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 21:08 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 27, 2021 8:56 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 27, 2021 17:08 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 23:46 UTC (Mon) by himi (subscriber, #340) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 21:07 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Packages like Chromium seem like a case study in "packages don't need to support architectures that have no users of *that specific package*".
Even Debian only builds Chromium for x86 and ARM.
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 21:14 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 22:21 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Feb 17, 2021 10:16 UTC (Wed) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 26, 2021 10:56 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 28, 2021 2:40 UTC (Thu) by fulke (guest, #140430) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 28, 2021 12:54 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
Google announcing removal of jumbo support - https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/ch... . According to my colleague who knows people on Chromium team the primary driver for the removal was a Google manager who got very upset after trying to figure out why his patch broke a build. Eventually he figured out it was due to the jumbo feature that added some small and very easy to follow restrictions on C++ code, but if one does not know about them, it can take some time to figure things out.
For getting jumbo to work with Chromium again - https://twitter.com/pati_gallardo/status/1352587508375293952
Overreactions?
Posted Feb 5, 2021 20:00 UTC (Fri) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
It turns out making people spend 8-16 hours a day every 6 weeks compiling a half-gigabyte rendering engine that's often only used for frivolous HTML approximations of native widgets gets tiresome fast. Maybe abandoning QtWebkit was a bad idea.
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 19:21 UTC (Mon) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 19:56 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 26, 2021 8:54 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 26, 2021 14:17 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 27, 2021 9:27 UTC (Wed) by caliloo (subscriber, #50055) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 20:15 UTC (Mon) by notriddle (subscriber, #130608) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 19:51 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]
Overreactions?
Posted Jan 25, 2021 19:59 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 18:25 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
But that is an use of Chromium which does not need any of the API keys in question. Whenever a broken web site does not work in Firefox (the only one I know of is webrtc calls on Slack, though there might be others), retrying in Chromium works just fine (if I don't convince my peer to try something else like Google Meet first; I haven't opened Chromium in months), and should keep working even after this change.
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 19:21 UTC (Mon) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link]
For that particular case, it seems some change a few weeks ago caused it to break in Firefox - I can connect to a call, but get disconnected a few seconds later. Since I'm forced to use it for work, Chromium it is (for that site). Incidentally, it's the only such site I've personally encountered. A vastly greater number of sites is broken by my combination of privacy addons, but a private window usually solves such problems quickly.
As an aside, I've also seen sites that work in Firefox but not Chrom{e,ium} - but I assume such sites can only survive in isolated, internal use only environments nowadays.
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 8:33 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 19:21 UTC (Tue) by jmclnx (guest, #72456) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 27, 2021 2:04 UTC (Wed) by jhhaller (guest, #56103) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 18:36 UTC (Mon) by re:fi.64 (subscriber, #132628) [Link]
This matches with the initial email, which said that the API keys will lose access to Google APIs like Chrome Sync.
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 20:03 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 16:17 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I don't work on Chrome, and don't know anything more about this than you probably do.)
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 18:20 UTC (Tue) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]
Firefox Sync is still going strong though. It's really amazingly nice of Mozilla to make this service available to non-Firefox apps with very few requirements (they boil down to "don't be malware" and "don't pretend to be Firefox").
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 18:25 UTC (Tue) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 18:43 UTC (Mon) by fenncruz (subscriber, #81417) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 19:15 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 11:43 UTC (Tue) by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836) [Link]
I hope that the actions taken by distribution maintainers to "disable APIs" still allow for BYO keys, although 95% of my browsing is in Firefox due to the Container Tabs feature which is miles ahead of Google profile functionality.
The endless browser wars
Posted Feb 17, 2021 12:52 UTC (Wed) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 18:54 UTC (Mon) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 21:17 UTC (Mon) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 22:59 UTC (Mon) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link]
Bookmark sync? pff, I use btrfs send, and abrowser. *smugness intensifies*
Obligatory: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-reall... . Server side spell-checking? Thats SaaSS. Removing it is an upgrade in the freedom dimension. Just based on reading this article, I'm happy about these changes.
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 23:15 UTC (Mon) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
The setup instructions make it very clear that us non-enterprise peasants, perhaps everyone outside of Mozilla, are not supposed to be even looking at this stuff, much less trying to use it. While it might satisfy the bare minimum required by a legal department (or a distro maintainer who doesn't look too closely at the browsers they ship), it's not open by any stretch of common sense.
A lot of chromium-based products also claim to have source available — in the disused lavatory in the basement, at the end of the corridor filled with landmines, down the unlit stairs with three steps missing. Nobody pretends that's anything other than malicious compliance.
This API key thing is probably the last straw after years of Google being malicious for a lot of distro maintainers; getting Chromium itself to build is an experience in masochism. I wish they'd throw out QtWebEngine too. The Broken Web deserves no quarter in FOSS.
The endless browser wars
Posted Feb 8, 2021 7:36 UTC (Mon) by emorrp1 (guest, #99512) [Link]
I am a happy self-hoster of firefox-syncserver for the data, (but Firefox Account for just identity) and it's been pretty awesome to not worry about sending off my browser history and still be able to sling tabs between devices for reading on the go or at home.
The main issue is that despite some good efforts in 2017, it still hasn't been fully converted to python3 - so in the coming year I'll have to work out how best to keep running it following python2 removal from repositories. Hopefully someone else will do the hard work, then we can package it for debian (#900867) which would hopefully make running it yourself more accessible.
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 23:20 UTC (Mon) by unixbhaskar (guest, #44758) [Link]
Okay, take it with a pinch of salt, it doesn't do all , like firefox or chromium did/do ...but it gets you going ,and provide stuff you need.
Quick , fast and till now less bloated. Compared to two those giant monolith , it's nothing ...
Confession, I had had very little use of Chromium and firefox's downhill ..force me to choose ...
Absolutely personal feeling and I am not gonna miss it for a single moment.
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 25, 2021 23:20 UTC (Mon) by martin.langhoff (guest, #61417) [Link]
In other words, I don't understand the hoopla without accompanying patches. Don't want to be the "back in my day" curmudgeon, and yet... back in my day we'd craft a patch to support alternative bookmark sync protocols and pointing to servers that you can self host.
Perhaps someone is working on a patch to add support to the same 3rd party services Firefox users can use, and it hasn't been reported?
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 14:46 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Mozilla is not handing out OAuth2 application keys to non-Mozilla projects for use with Mozilla's deployment. You can set up your own fxa-auth and fxa-sync servers though.
The endless browser wars
Posted Feb 9, 2021 1:44 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Feb 9, 2021 15:51 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 0:28 UTC (Tue) by kunitz (subscriber, #3965) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 0:54 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
Both Chrome and Edge are intended to help lock you into their respective maker's software-as-a-service ecosystems;
(To be blunt all of these "chromium" users put together probably don't even count as a rounding error vs Chrome or Edge, to say nothing of their combined install base..)
The endless browser wars: Debian edition
Posted Jan 26, 2021 4:18 UTC (Tue) by calumapplepie (subscriber, #143655) [Link]
Jokes aside, Chromium packaging is a massive headache. It's been knocked out of bullseye because the maintainer didn't feel they could keep up alone, and the current factor blocking its re-entry is the fact that people are hesitant to commit to providing security support to such a headache of a package for the next 3 years. Chromium might be open-source, but it's really a Google product intended to be downloaded from Google and used under their watchful gaze. I can't say I'm shocked at this change.
Chromium is better sometimes
Posted Jan 26, 2021 6:49 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]
First of all, it works only with Chromium and derivatives, like MS Edge. It doesn't work with Firefox.
Second, the core requirement for gaming platforms is a realtime decoding if 1080p or 4k video streams. Chrome on Linux DOES NOT support accelerated video decoding. Software decoder in this browser introduces over 1 second of delay, making first person shooters unplayable.
At the same time, Chromium in RPMFusion repositories carries patches to fix hardware video decoding, making it a better browser than plain Chrome.
It's ironic that Google-provided browser is worse for Google platform than 3rd-party recompile.
(It is also ironic that games available on Stadia are being run on Linux, while there are not available on Linux as standalone)
Chromium is better sometimes
Posted Jan 26, 2021 9:08 UTC (Tue) by sandsmark (guest, #62172) [Link]
Not anymore, it just needs to be enabled at build time. Arch Linux has enabled it without patches (AFAIK) for a fairly long time now: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packa...
Chromium is better sometimes
Posted Jan 26, 2021 11:21 UTC (Tue) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link]
Chromium is better sometimes
Posted Jan 26, 2021 23:39 UTC (Tue) by mss (subscriber, #138799) [Link]
Often not only when decoding videos but also when doing just hardware-accelerated OpenGL rendering.
It looks like GPUs are designed primary with performance in mind, not long-term stability.
Chromium is better sometimes
Posted Jan 29, 2021 16:52 UTC (Fri) by sheepdestroyer (guest, #54968) [Link]
Chromium is better sometimes
Posted Jan 29, 2021 17:55 UTC (Fri) by mss (subscriber, #138799) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 12:39 UTC (Tue) by al4711 (subscriber, #57932) [Link]
I hope this "Safe Browsing" tracking will also be remove as it is removed on this patch-set https://ungoogled-software.github.io/
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 26, 2021 14:23 UTC (Tue) by joey (guest, #328) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Jan 27, 2021 9:57 UTC (Wed) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link]
If bookmark synchronisation really is such a killer app, I would have thought that setting up Floccus would be less philosophically and technically challenging than switching to an even more proprietary browser.
API Key rotation
Posted Jan 28, 2021 14:20 UTC (Thu) by kpfleming (subscriber, #23250) [Link]
I suspect Google could rotate the API keys every 3-4 months without much of a disturbance for 'normal' (Google channel) Chrome users.
Don't forget to call out websites which refuse to run on anything but Google Chrome (and Safari)
Posted Jan 30, 2021 2:16 UTC (Sat) by jrw (subscriber, #69959) [Link]
I really try to avoid such websites, but in this case I felt it was worth it to compromise. However I also felt duty bound to encourage them to try harder to use a framework which supports Firefox and test against it, so I called Meijer's customer service desk to complain and also sent them an email.
Don't forget to call out websites which refuse to run on anything but Google Chrome (and Safari)
Posted Jan 31, 2021 5:25 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]
So you weren't willing to die for software freedom?
The endless browser wars
Posted Feb 4, 2021 4:25 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (guest, #34648) [Link]
https://github.com/ipernet/chromium-sync-server/
Mind you, I've never tried it. I run my own Weave 1.1 sync server and use Pale Moon.
The endless browser wars
Posted Feb 5, 2021 22:53 UTC (Fri) by iainn (guest, #64312) [Link]
Personally I'd recommend against a sync server that “does not persist data on restart”. That said, I recently read that Brave’s sync server is FOSS.
The endless browser wars
Posted Feb 7, 2021 14:54 UTC (Sun) by bblacksr (subscriber, #83377) [Link]
The endless browser wars
Posted Feb 14, 2021 18:35 UTC (Sun) by ILMostro (guest, #105083) [Link]