I'm surprised people still use Chrome and not Chromium. Perhaps a few devs in your situation could improve the Chromium installation flow for Windows, etc.
Google doesn't have much incentive to make it easy, but third parties (like Debian) do, and do a lot of the heavy lifting on an ongoing basis.
google still has their hands in chromium, so it's not much of an improvement over chrome. there's supposedly a way[0] to remove all of google's shenanigans from chromium, but I doubt the brave folks are going to go through that much trouble.
Also, for those who care about licensing, chromium is a licensing nightmare. half (or more?) of the repos in the externals directory when building chromium have no license specified.
People who want the convenience and don't care about syncing their Google account and sending their keystrokes to Google servers can always install Chrome. For Chromium, staying away from proprietary services by default is much more keeping with the spirit of open source.
I use Firefox. But, I'd be willing to install a version of Chrome if it came without all of the Google garbage pre-installed. I was hoping that maybe Chromium could fill this role.
Chromium is used over Chrome because the Google integration of Chrome is not desirable. If you are going to then sign into a Google account in Chromium you might as well just use Chrome. This entire story seems like a non issue.
Chromium without any Google integrations seems like the exact point of Chromium in the first place.
I can't even figure out how to install a stable version of Chromium. I only spent two minutes trying, but installing Chrome consists of one web search and one button click, so the difference is pretty obvious to me.
What's wrong with using Chromium though? I understand most of the work being done on it is by Google, but do they control the direction of the project?
Chrome and Chromium are virtually identical except for Google services, which aren't required to do anything with the browser except for installing Chrome extensions that can alternatively be sideloaded, so this is nitpicking.
What are your objections to Chrome? Chromium seems like a reasonable project and everything that's not in Chromium seems to be pretty well Google specific and probably shouldn't be in Chromium IMHO.
Chromium is open source, which Chrome is based on. I don't understand what everyone is complaining about. Chromium will always be around, so if you're paranoid about Google sneaking in some stuff into Chrome to steal your info, then use Chromium. I like Mozilla, but they haven't been able to keep up in my book.
Chromium's a hard one for Debian. It is a big software that often suffers from security issues due to its size but it is hard to package according to Debian's policies. Its upstream ships with forked dependencies included, and this goes against Debian's policy, however Debian doesn't have enough manpower to untangle this mess while keeping up with Chromium's upstream.
I wish they would just drop it from their repos and suggest users to use flatpaks (or Nix?) or the proprietary variant Chrome (which is what most likely want due to sync), it is a big liability to keep an insecure browser around.
Google doesn't have much incentive to make it easy, but third parties (like Debian) do, and do a lot of the heavy lifting on an ongoing basis.
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