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

[Clément Lassieur]

Hi Ricardo,

Thank you for your reply.

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

Sure, I'll report them when I find the time.

>> 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.

It's not clear to me :-)  Does it mean we can merge?

> 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.

Thank you for this important information.

Clément