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

[Amin Bandali]

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> 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.

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

-- 
Amin Bandali      |  GNU webmaster  | Grad student, UWaterloo
https://aminb.org | https://gnu.org |    https://aminb.org/uw
GnuPG Key: CDDE 75F9 0353 8E71 813C  DA27 D1FB A366 27D6 5876