Re: Firefox 52's end of life, packaging Chromium

[Joshua Branson <jbranso@fastmail.com>]

Amin Bandali <amin@gnu.org> writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
>
>>> So the question is: can we push the Chromium package?  I've read it's
>>> almost ready[2].
>>
>> The TODO list for convenience:
>>
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>> * There is still some data transmitted when starting the browser for the
>>   first time.  It seems related to the "domain_reliability" component.
>> * Remove remaining "Web Store" links.  Currently I've only found it in
>>   settings, under "accessibility" and "fonts".
>> * Opening settings transmits a bunch of data, the next version will
>>   include the 'disable-translation-lang-fetch' patch from Inox.
>> * PDFium is built, but does not seem to work (the 'install' phase
>>   probably needs tweaking).  Might just disable it instead.
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>>
>> It would be *very* nice if the first and third items could be solved
>> before merging, but I don’t consider them blockers.  Would someone like
>> to investigate one of these problems?
>>
>> As has been stated multiple times in the discussion of this evolving
>> patch set, we cannot guarantee privacy, but we can make attempts to
>> remove problems as they become known.  This will remain an uphill battle
>> and in future iterations of this package we should try to integrate more
>> patches provided by other groups working on removing anti-features from
>> Chromium.
>
> I highly recommend looking into ungoogled-chromium [0], which
> "modifies Google Chromium to remove Google integration and
> enhance privacy, control, and transparency".  It's not exactly a
> fork, but rather a series of patches and modifications they apply
> to each Chromium release.

There is also the Brave browser

https://brave.com/

>
> In terms of documentation, they have a high-level description of
> the various components and patches [1], and build instructions
> for a few platforms and distros [2].  There was also an attempt
> to make a nix package a while ago [3], which may be helpful to
> look at.
>
> [0]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
> [1]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/docs/design.md
> [2]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/docs/building.md
> [3]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/30916