Bye-bye Chromium?
23 January 2021Most of the time I use Chrome I actually use the upstream open-source Chromium, which has a specially-compiled package available for Slackware from the AlienBob repository. It seems that Google are making changes that would cripple it by disallowing it access to Google accounts for things like password storage. I don't know the whole story and like many things it might get reversed, but if it does not then I may well be ditching the browser.
In the past I mostly used Chromium for those times when Firefox, especially with the way I have it locked it down with things like NoScript and Facebook Container, but in the last few years I have used it for sharing some passwords and bookmarks between my home and work systems. However it looks like Google have decided to make access to Google Drive et al something that only Google-built programs can do, which is problematic as the official Google Chrome build has issues on Slackware. It is unclear whether possible work-arounds that need end-users getting their own API keys are practical.
If Chromium stops working properly for what will be essentially political reasons, I am pretty much going to stop using it. When software gets dogmatic political problems, and this looks like a text-book example of it in the making, they tend to only correct themselves once the program goes into terminal decline.