Re: Emacs Webapp/Plugin

[Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>]

On 4 Aug 2012, Lennart Borgman uttered the following:

> On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
>>
>> My understanding was that although binary distributed by google wasn't
>> free, because it includes various bells and whistles implemented with
>> non-free libraries (e.g. video decoding ...?), the guts of the browser
>> _is_ actually free software, and a completely free version of it
>> exists ("chromium", which is in debian) which simply omits the
>> non-free bells and whistles.  I've tried both, and didn't notice any
>> obvious difference between them, so I'm not really sure what exactly
>> the bells-and-whistles consists of...
>>
>> I don't know how the difference between the free and non-free versions
>> affects plugins though...

There is a 'more secure' version of Flash in there (using PPAPI rather
than NPAPI, so somewhat sandboxed: this happens to be the only Flash
implementation still receiving active development on GNU/Linux platforms
anymore). That's it. Exciting? Not hardly.

The loss of actual useful functionality from Chrome to Chromium is
entirely ignorable if you don't care about Flash -- and it is becoming
increasingly less worth caring about, thank goodness.

> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome
>
> (What is "metrics" mentioned there?)

It's an anonymous reporting mechanism: a (small) fraction of your more
unusual user-interface operations are reported to Google so that they
can tell e.g. if UI elements are badly structured, what operations
people frequently do, that sort of thing. It sounds really creepy, but
is also quite useful -- this was how Google determined that far too many
people were just saying 'yeah, go ahead' when it warned about loading of
insecure scripts from an SSL page, for instance. I'd say that as long as
it remains opt-in, it's not worth worrying about: the code that
implements this mechanism *is* IIRC free, so you can look in Chromium to
satisfy yourself that it's not doing anything really creepy like
reporting the contents of input boxes without permission. (I'm actually
mildly annoyed that I can't turn it on in my otherwise-unmodified
Chromium install -- why should the fact that I want my browser to be
100% free software prevent me from helping the developers in this way?)

-- 
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