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

[Nils Gillmann <ng0@n0.is>]

Joshua Branson transcribed 2.3K bytes:
> 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/

It would very likely not be accepted in Guix. At least by my
interpretation of what we have included and cared for so far. Brave is
basically replacing Ads with other Ads and all the requests you make
in the browser are send through their proprietary servers.
Could be that we already discussed Brave a while back on irc or on
this list. Even when rejected, no onw forbids anyone to provide it
outside of core.

> >
> > 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
>