Google Chrome Deadline—72 Hours To Update Or Delete Your Browser
www.forbes.com
The U.S. government’s emergency update warnings have June 3 and June 6 deadlines.

As read from my Mozilla Firefox…

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1901·
    5 months ago

    headlines have focused on the detrimental effect this will have on ad blockers, which will need to adopt a complex workaround to work as now. There is a risk that users reading those headlines might seek to delay updating their browser, to prevent any ad blocker issues; you really shouldn’t go down this road—the security update is critical.

    It’s almost like tying together feature updates with security updates was a deliberate choice by tech companies so that they could tell users shit exactly like this.

    How can there be any real market choices when software literally tells users “for your own safety, you must abandon the things you want, and take the things we give you”. How can consumers influence the direction of the product if they never have the option to decline that direction?

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      5 months ago

      When it comes to open source software, market choices aren’t nearly as necessary because new ones can be created at will and very low cost by forking. But in the abstract thech companies are definitely not interested in choices. Choices don’t maximize profits.

        • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
          81·
          5 months ago

          It depends on how fat the fork is. While I haven’t worked on Blink, as a developer who works on other people’s very large codebases, including one from Google, I disagree. There are free tools for build automation. That’ll take care of being up-to-date with upstream in terms of security. Patching things can be done using conflict-minimizing strategies. I used to work at an Android OEM and I’ve seen it done with great success. Thinking of Blink specifically, there have been lots of forks during its WebKit days. If I remember correctly there are also thin forks of Firefox maintained by some open source developers. This is all to support thay I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Especially if most of it is rebranding and restoring some deprecated or deleted functionality. Could be wrong. I think we’ll see, because I have a feeling the cost of maintaining a Chromium fork could be cheaper than patching apps to work well on Firefox. Some corpos might even pitch in. Not to mention that it isn’t at all obvious for how long Firefox will be developed by Mozilla. If they drop the ball at some point we’ll be faced with implementing new features in Firefox vs patching features of Chromium. ⚖️

          • mryessir@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            3·
            5 months ago

            It does not depend in how fat the fork is. You provide some reasons on your own.

            Your assumption appears to be that open source software can be maintained with minimal costs by the community and sofware-aid assures an ongoing bug prevention of some sort.

            In the end you still need at least a few full-time devs on it. It would be fair to pay them accordingly if they are maintaining behemoths of software.

            Funfact: Infrastructure costs are x-times higher then IT Personel in my organization. A big chunk of it is energy and space; But its less then licensing costs…

            • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
              2·
              5 months ago

              The Debian community already maintains a Chromium fork. How much does that cost?

              The human time needed should grow with the number of patches that need to be applied to the upstream code base, because some will fail now and then. This is what I refer to as “fatness” of the fork. The more patches, the fatter. It should be possible to build, packege and publish a fork with zero patches without human intervention, after the initial automation work. Testing is done by the users as it always has been in Debian and its derivatives. You’re referring to a few full-time developers and I simply don’t see the need. Maybe I’m missing something obvious. 😅

              • mryessir@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
                2·
                5 months ago

                The Debian community not already maintains a Chromium fork. How much does that cost?

                I honestly can’t and wouldn’t judge: Time, Resources, implicit know-how etc. are unknown to me.

                The human time needed should grow with the number of patches that need to be applied to the upstream code base, …

                jupp

                … because some will fail now and then.

                Forks are done due to different reasons. Therefore it depends why to fork. It could be possible that one feature diverges so much that applying patches isn’t enough. Especially patches in a debian sense, neither .diff/.patch-patches.

                This is what I refer to as “fatness” of the fork. The more patches, the fatter. It should be possible to build, packege and publish a fork with zero patches without human intervention, after the initial automation work.

                For a brief period, until something rattles on the build system. Debian patches are often applied to remove binary blobs due to licensing - Imagine upstream chooses to include M$ Recall into the render engine. You would need to apply extraordinary amounts of work. Maybe even maintaining a complete separate implementation. This would also imply changes on the build systems, which needs to get aligned continiously between both upstreams, now.

                Maybe I’m missing something obvious. 😅

                With each version you have to very carefully review every commit if you want to maintain compatability with upstream, in order to merge patches into your fork.

                When there are 50 devs working on upstream and you need to review every commit to assure requirement X, this alone is a hard path. If you need to also apply workarounds compatible with future versions of upstream, you need PROFESSIONALS. Luckily these are found in the FOSS community; But they are underpaid and worse: underappreciated.

                // plus I could imagine that things like chrome may even not be coming with the full test suite. The test suite of a browser are surely so huge I can’t even comprehend the effort put into it. And then bug tickets… Upstream says: Not in my version. Now the fork has to address these themselves! :)

    • Alpha71@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      How can consumers influence the direction of the product if they never have the option to decline that direction?

      They always have an option, they just don’t have the balls to actually do it.

  • DaCrazyJamez@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    686·
    5 months ago

    So google manufactured a (possibly false) security risk to force users into updating to manifest v3 software?

    • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      its not a false security risk, it really is unsecure to withhold updates.

      the bullshit comes from what they are doing.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      18·
      5 months ago

      Do it!

      I’m still working on it, but I’ve cut out quite a bit. Start with Chrome, and work your way down.

      When you get to email, Gmail has a very convenient forwarding feature so you can forward all email to the new one while you change accounts and whatnot. I made a new account elsewhere, and I have a separate folder for email from my old Gmail and my new email. Every so often I’ll go fix an account or two, so I’m making steady progress.

      For me, docs/drive is the hardest, so I’m doing it last. I’m playing with self-hosted options, and am still in an adjustment period.

      • QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        5 months ago

        Getting away from Google Maps has been a tough one. There aren’t many options there, it’s either Google, Apple, Microsoft, or OpenStreetMap.

        I’ve been contributing to OSM for my local area as much as possible to update businesses and their opening hours, website, etc., but it’s not a small task.

        • r0ertel@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          Hello fellow OSM contributor! We’ve been doing driver’s ed at home and while I’m in the passenger seat, I’m poppin’ everything on Street Complete! The kid gets the required behind the wheel hours and I’m contributing to OSM.

        • dan1101@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          For Google Maps, what about a dedicated phone for just running Maps? It would only get internet from hotspot on your real phone.

          • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            2·
            5 months ago

            2 phones is a huge pain in the ass even when they have completely separate contexts like work & personal.

            It’s a hard no if it’s just for maps.

      • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        Sync.com was my solution to replacing Google Drive. It was the only one I could find that actually did everything Google Drive did (and is less expensive). They’re honest and communicative, unlike Dropbox or Google.

    • callmepk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      5 months ago

      I have to use for work, because all our customer only uses chrome or chrome-based browser :(

    • devilish666@lemmy.worldEnglish
      52·
      5 months ago

      Well it’s me bc my job :

      1. YouTube Revanced for entertainment
      2. MicroG for account for apps that need google dependency for work
      3. Gmail for personal email although nowadays i rarely used it because my client rather used Telegram or WhatsApp
      4. GDrive for backup
      • eodur@lemmy.worldEnglish
        32·
        5 months ago

        I highly recommend looking at something like Proton for 3 and 4. Or backblaze for 4 if it’s truly for backup.

        • devilish666@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Thx for recommendations bro
          I already used proton but that’s only for truly personal stuff, a lot of things on my country only support Microsoft mail or google sadly that’s why I’m still using gmail for works, same thing like WhatsApp

          Now i only need recommendations for YouTube apps that can sync playlist from my YouTube (like SpMp music player), bc i hate using YtRevanced patch every time YouTube roll out new apps

  • NutWrench@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    5 months ago

    So . . . exactly what stealth crap is hidden in the Chrome “update?”

    " . . . but it’s also the day Google started to pull the plug on many Manifest V2 extensions as its rollout of Manifest V3 takes shape."

    Ahhhh, there we go. Manifest 3 will break almost all Chrome adblockers.

  • thejml@lemm.eeEnglish
    261·
    5 months ago

    I choose to just continue not having it in the first place. I uninstalled it from my work PC a year ago and never put it on either personal install. Definitely haven’t missed it.

  • Luna@lemdro.idEnglish
    211·
    5 months ago

    Meanwhile my school still uses Chrome v109 since that was the last version that supported Windows 8

  • Sam_Bass@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    5 months ago

    Awfully convenient for this to come along to coincide with.chrome new manifest change