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Tom "spot" Callaway 🇺🇸🇺🇦
@spotfoss
Google has announced that it is cutting off access to the Sync and "other Google Exclusive" APIs from all builds except Google Chrome. This will make the Fedora Chromium build significantly less functional (along with every other distro packaged Chromium).
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Tom "spot" Callaway 🇺🇸🇺🇦
@spotfoss
It is noteworthy that Google _gave_ the builders of distribution Chromium packages these access rights back in 2013 via API keys, specifically so that we could have open source builds of Chromium with (near) feature parity to Chrome.
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Tom "spot" Callaway 🇺🇸🇺🇦
@spotfoss
The reasoning given for this change? Google does not want users to be able to "access their personal Chrome Sync data (such as bookmarks) ... with a non-Google, Chromium-based browser." They're not closing a security hole, they're just requiring that everyone use Chrome.
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Tom "spot" Callaway 🇺🇸🇺🇦
@spotfoss
Building Chromium as part of Fedora has caught a number of bugs that would not have been noticed by Google Chrome until much later (if ever). While I don't have firm usage numbers, I suspect that a lot of Fedora and EPEL instances use it.
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