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

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Clément,

> Firefox 52 isn't supported anymore upstream[1] and we don't have a
> package for Firefox 60.  Currently the only alternative is Epiphany but
> it's close to unusable (it crashes every 5 minutes, and sometimes
> freezes my computer).

I’m surprised to hear that you’ve had problems with Epiphany.  I’m using
it daily for dozens of tabs and I recommend it to people who cannot use
Icecat.  It’s difficult to send good bug reports when the browser
freezes the computer, of course, but it would be helpful to get more
information about these crashes, if you can reproduce them.

> 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.

Thanks to Marius for driving the evolution of this patch set through
multiple upgrades and bringing it to a usable state!

My personal recommendation is to use Epiphany if possible (and Icecat
once version 60 is ready) and to be careful with Chromium.

--
Ricardo