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Google has turned off access to sync features for Chromium

430 points by stsewd 6y ago

rdiddly 6y ago
I wonder if this is a reaction to Chromium-based Edge overtaking Internet Exploder as the most popular Microsoft browser. Edit: I guess maybe not.
- butz 6y ago
  Didn't Microsoft replace all Google APIs with its own alternatives? This change probably will have bigger impact for other browsers built on Chromium, like Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc.
  - cheph 6y ago
    Pretty sure Opera, Vivaldi and Brave does not sync to google servers. The syncing to their servers will still work fine AFAIU.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      Yeah as far as I know every major Chromium browser has their own system. Why would they want to use Google's system?
      - sirius87 6y ago
        Chromium would have to safely store and manage user data on their servers, which is an additional cost.
    - lscotte 6y ago
      Can't speak for the others, but Brave uses it's own sync system and is not affected by this.
  - sirius87 6y ago
    Vivaldi syncs with their own servers, and it syncs a lot more data - such as notes - like in the Opera 12.x days.
- cheph 6y ago
  Pretty sure Chromium based edge does not sync to google > 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. I actually use this for having one google profile running in two browsers on one computer (one with a proxy, one without). Sucks quite a bit as this is the primary sync system for Chromium. You can run your own but that is not quite that nice.
  - jeremydw 6y ago
    Instead of running Chrome and Chromium, try Chrome and Chrome Beta (or Dev/Nightly)? You can run the same profile in both and have two instances open.
    - cheph 6y ago
      Thanks for the tip, worked like a charm. I was worried that the icons would be the same, but they are not, so it is same user experience basically.
kowlo 6y ago
> There is no good reason for Google to do this, other than to force people to use Chrome. Sounds like a good reason (for them) to me! I've not used Chrome or Chromium for a while... nowadays it's between Safari and Firefox for me.
coding123 6y ago
This is actually a good thing. People shouldn't be syncing ANYTHING with google :)
- andrewinardeer 6y ago
  Let people choose what to do.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    They can choose to use chrome I guess. If you don't trust chrome, why would you trust google sync to save all of your data to their servers.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      Chromium has open source value besides "not Google".
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    Pushing people to take uninformed choices is a so-called dark pattern.
  - naringas 6y ago
    but make certain choices easier, much easier. just use chrome, it's just less of a hassle. I dubbed this "convenience herding". nobody is forcing you to do anything; they are just making some things very very inconvenient relative to how easy it's to just put it all in their servers or use their software (the cloud is an euphemism for not your computer)
    - foolmeonce 6y ago
      Yes, but they have been simultaneously making it very hard not to use their sign-in your browser and sync everything. If they actually revert chromium to not having any of this, they have the problem that they are building a path that works for a lot of people and takes us further away from chrome. It will be politically bad if they dead end that path, but a politically bad end is not unlikely.
bluewalt 6y ago
Does it mean the end of browsers like Brave?
- dvcrn 6y ago
  Brave doesn’t use googles sync
- lscotte 6y ago
  No.
teraflop 6y ago
Here is the discussion on the Chromium embedder-dev mailing list: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/NXm7GIKTNTE https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/NX... Most interesting to me is that even though the Chrome team specifically provided API keys for open-source Chromium builds to use back in 2013, they are now claiming that "the Terms of Service don't allow this usage, and [the previous developer] didn't have authority to change the terms."
- izacus 6y ago
  The way Google is communicating in that topic is downright horrible - like talking to a corporate robot. Hiring Oracle managers is seriously starting to show it seems.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    Don't blame Oracle for this. Page/Pichai sign off on these plans.
    - paxys 6y ago
      I highly doubt this decision went all the way up to Page or Pichai.
      - x0x0 6y ago
        I would be surprised if, given the antitrust sensitivity around chrome, these decisions aren't being approved at a very high level.
        jfrunyon 6y ago
        That would ruin their plausible deniability.
        wegs 6y ago
        My experience from other organizations: * Corruption runs to the top. * The top is very careful to communicate verbally, through implications, or otherwise. Dunno about Google.
juancn 6y ago
This makes sense from a support point of view. Supporting non-standard configurations costs money (both in direct and indirect ways, such as developer attention and time lost triaging bugs, etc.), they don't want to spend the money on it.
- callmeal 6y ago
  >This makes sense from a support point of view. Support? Isn't this google we're talking about?
  - geek_at 6y ago
    they need two whole server racks to process the auto-delete function that runs their support email backend ;)
  - izacus 6y ago
    Do you expect Google (or any other publicly traded corpo facing pressure from shareholders) to finance hosting of competing products? I don't think it's a reasonable expectation from US corporations so we need to take their marketing with a grain of salt.
    - m-p-3 6y ago
      All the major Chrome-like competitors like Brave and Edge already uses their own sync engine, so the only users they're punishing are the users of Chromium.
- MPSimmons 6y ago
  What support does Google offer for this?
- snoshy 6y ago
  There's nothing non-standard about this. The API keys to enable this functionality were provided by Google itself in 2013.
jsnell 6y ago
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801113
santoshalper 6y ago
Man, the "don't be evil" days seem like so long ago.
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
Is the sync protocol documented? Can you just use an alternative server of some kind? Does vanilla Chromium try to sync at all now? Does it silently fail, loudly fail, or just never try?
- steren 6y ago
  Looks like it is? https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync And even if not, since the client is OSS, it can be inferred.
- nullify88 6y ago
  There used to be a Python sync server used in the Chromium project that was used to test sync functionality. Someone discovered this and yanked out the relevant code to enable self hosting. https://github.com/infeeeee/chrome-sync-server https://github.com/infeeeee/chrome-sync-server Though its since been replaced by some c++ fake server. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/master/components/sync/test/fake_server/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/he...
salusinarduis 6y ago
This is great. Never understood why that proprietary system was in Chromium to begin with.
- Arnavion 6y ago
  Yeah. For users that had to worry about disabling these features for privacy, now they can rest assured the features won't work even if they wanted to.
- bzb6 6y ago
  If the client implementation is public then there’s nothing stopping you from developing a server.
  - mmmeff 6y ago
    To be fair, it's a helluva lot more work to reverse engineer the server implementation from the client than it is to build a client for an open source server.f
abrowne 6y ago
I won't miss sync (I don't use it), but I'll miss the Google Translate feature.
hedgehog 6y ago
"Users of products that are incorrectly using these APIs"... This might be the right thing for them to do but what an incredibly arrogant way to word the e-mail.
- teraflop 6y ago
  Especially given that Chromium distributors had previously been given explicit permission to use the sync APIs.
qwerty456127 6y ago
Why would anybody insist on using them? Isn't there enough of 3-rd party cross-browser bookmark/passwords/whatever syncing tools available?
- katsura 6y ago
  Because I can share pages between my phone and my laptop with a few taps, without copy/pasting the links between different services. Edit: just to clarify, I have an iPhone, and I run Linux on my laptop. Whenever I tried using Firefox on my phone, I had a bunch of problems with it, so it is quite limited what I can use to sync between my two devices.
  - m-p-3 6y ago
    I have Android on my phone and sending a page to it isn't as seamless as I'd expect, like it sometimes either takes a while or I have to go in my Firefox Sync settings and force a refresh to get the page.
    - qwerty456127 6y ago
      I just share whatever I want with myself in Telegram.
      - toyg 6y ago
        That... I should have thought of that a long time ago. FF is great but the "send to device" feature has not worked for me in years. I suspect it got confused when I migrated my Apple profile to a new phone.
        m-p-3 6y ago
        I alternatively do the same with Signal and the "Note to Self" conversation.
  - kovac 6y ago
    Can't you just "share" the page via email, a messenger or a cloud drive? This is what I usually do. I use Vivaldi and Brave but I've never used sync feature of any browser I've used.
AnssiH 6y ago
Huh? The title seems inaccurate to me, considering the page says: > Google isn't shutting off the API access until March 15, 2021, but I have gone ahead and disabled it starting with this update. So it seems to be that Fedora has turned the features off early, and Google has not (yet). (at the time of writing the title says "Google has turned off")
- canofbars 6y ago
  The difference is somewhat meaningless. It will be gone very soon regardless of what fedora does. Cutting it off early means they can time it with a release so people get the release notes rather than it just stopping working without having updated.
drdavid 6y ago
It has been like that in (my) Linux for a long time? This isn't new by any means. Lemme check. Current version: Version 88.0.4324.50 (Developer Build) Ubuntu 18.04 (64-bit) It looks like I installed this OS in July of this year, which means Chromium would have been installed in July of this year - the 5th to be exact. When started, it gives a warning about not having certain APIs and lacking functionality because of this. It has done that since at least July of this year. I'm sure it did so before that, but I can only show that I've had this installed since July of this year. This isn't even remotely new. Whatever version it was that I installed back in July did the same thing, or should I say didn't do the same thing? It hasn't had sync enabled since day one. I currently have Lubuntu 18.04 and Chromium is installed by way of .deb channels - not a snap.
rektide 6y ago
i'd be lovely to see a write up on what the implementation does, how it transfers data. is there grpc? i feel like there's going to be grpc. what kind of endpoints does it talk with? can anyone find the old #xmpp based sync-code in the source code archives? it'd be fun to compare how sync used to work on the old semi-xmpp based platform versus how it works now. that this sync used to built somewhat around xmpp always fascinated me but i never dug in. there's got to be some neat interesting morsels in the code, around this, if we go looking for it. there also used to be a very unsophisticated demo sync server one could run themselves[1]! i kept thinking/wishing people would take this & run with it, stop sending their core data to google, own the stack, own their systems, take responsibility, possibly expand & innovate openly on sync. it always seemed logical & obvious, but i didn't ever do it myself, & best i can tell, no one else really did either. fwiw, the interfaces are part of the open source code[2], then & now, i believe, but the specific implementation is unavailable. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/614744/how-to-set-up-a-own-chrome-sync-server https://superuser.com/questions/614744/how-to-set-up-a-own-c... [2] https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync
manuel_w 6y ago
If you want to synchronize your bookmarks across devices and even browsers, you may want to look at https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ https://www.xbrowsersync.org/. It doesn't require registration. The clients you would like to sync just need to enter the same sync id and password. If I understand right, the password is used to encrypt your data on client-side. The server (called "service" in xbrowsersync lingo) only sees an anonymous sync id with a binary blob it can't read. If a sync id is not used for a while, the associated stored data gets deleted. That's it. There is no "account" in the traditional sense. I really like this simplistic approach. It's even open-source. You don't need to use the default https://api.xbrowsersync.org https://api.xbrowsersync.org service but can also host it yourself. I'm using it and it works quite good. Every now and then sync fails, but I think I narrowed it down: It fails only when you create a bookmark in a just-created directory. But am not sure and didn't file a bug report, though.
- 1996 6y ago
  Does it work with chromium variants, like edge? What about for "collections"? Under the hood, it mustn't be so different from bookmarks.
  - manuel_w 6y ago
    Chromium variants: Edge support is planned for v1.6.0. (https://github.com/xbrowsersync/app/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/xbrowsersync/app/wiki/Roadmap) v1.5.2 is the current version. Collections: Don't know, I'm not using collections.
  - rbut 6y ago
    Floccus works with chromium variants like edge. https://floccus.org/ https://floccus.org/
- hrez 6y ago
  I'll add that it works well across chrome/brave/firefox. You can self-host it with 3d party https://github.com/ishani/xSyn https://github.com/ishani/xSyn Which is written in go so it's as simple as running a binary.
- 6y ago
arexxbifs 6y ago
Does this mean Chromium will be "ungoogled"[0] by default? [0] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#key-features https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#key-features
paxys 6y ago
If you want to use a Google account and Google sync/other services you may as well just use Chrome anyways. To me the entire point of packaged Chromium is that it is Google-free.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  It's entirely the point until it isn't, such as when you (or the distro package maintainer) want's to change something only available in compile time. E.g. up until recently I had to compile with certain options to be able to pass the runtime flag for native Wayland integration.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Or of course the many benefits of free software that many champion yet strangely never use and simultaneously become confused at when someone else do. The number of times I've seen Reddit's r/linux users react with confusion to ire when someone actually makes changes to the source code to suit his own personal needs is bizarrely large.
jfrunyon 6y ago
> To reiterate, the APIs were not designed to be used by third-party software, so short of a complete rewrite, there is no unfortunately no option. The unfortunate (for Google) reality is (as had already been pointed out to this fellow multiple times before he said that): whether they turn off these Linux distros' keys, people can still write third-party software to (ab)use these APIs, using Google's own keys. The CFAA is only going to keep legit uses from using Google's keys. This does not, in any way, fix the issue that Google is claiming it fixes.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  I think you misunderstand Google's intention. They want to prevent competitor browsers from using these APIs so people are forced to use Chrome (and it probably relieves some backwards compatibility work too). Yes, you can steal Chrome's keys, but Google can easily update those in Chrome. Are you going to write an automated system to extract the keys from Chrome on every update? Doubtful. This stops browsers like Opera and Brave from using the APIs.
  - oss2020 6y ago
    Brave and Opera both use their own solutions for syncing. In fact, can anyone name a browser except Chromium that uses Chrome's sync servers for syncing? Because I can't. Also your point about backwards compatibility doesn't really make sense as Google has plenty of ways to detect browser version and capabilities of the sync engine (the sync engine sends that info to the sync server voluntarily right now). Also Google can't just disable it's own API keys every time there is an update because this would shut down a large number of it's own users too. They would need to wait at least 1-3 months to avoid larger disruptions and this would give others more than enough time to fetch the latest keys (and if there is interest, there will always be someone who does that and posts them).
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      > Also Google can't just disable it's own API keys every time there is an update because this would shut down a large number of it's own users too. It can because the official Chrome auto-updates very reliably. They only have to support a few versions back. They could even force updates if they wanted. None of that is true for Chromium. Do they really want to support the 10 year old Chromium from Debian stable?
jfrunyon 6y ago
> > I am considering an alternative approach to just stopping with my Slackware packages - and that is to inform my users about the public availability of Google's own API keys, plus the fact that you just have to export them in your shell environment as values for the GOOGLE_API_KEY, GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_SECRET variables before you start Chromium. > That would still be prohibited by our policies, and may be broken in the future without notice. How on earth would that possibly be prohibited by their policies? Google's users using Google's service for personal use consistent with Google's terms is prohibited by their policies?
- simcop2387 6y ago
  Doing so with unauthorized software is against their policies
  - sneak 6y ago
    That's not how network services work. If a person is authorized to make the API call, the person is authorized to make the API call. Service operators are not permitted in law to dictate client software, outside of copyright license terms.
    - t0mas88 6y ago
      While that would be a great law to have I don't think it exists. If I make an API for my own client software and put in the terms that you can only use my system in the combination in which I provide it, I think you're out of luck. The only law I can think of that could get involved is the DMCA. If my client implements usage/content restrictions (very stupid design) you using the API with another program in violation of the terms could be considered circumventing the content restrictions and that's illegal due to the DMCA.
      - sneak 6y ago
        You seem to be conflating the DMCA, which regulates copying of copyrighted material, and the CFAA, which criminalizes unauthorized access. I don't think there is any case law related to "which client was used" applications of the CFAA. I can't really imagine any reasonable circumstance where someone would be authorized with one client and unauthorized with another. It's not really a reasonable position; if you offer a free network service on the internet, and anyone is authorized to use it, I don't know of any legal basis for gating that authorization on "user of your software". Perhaps some internet-clueless judge will one day disagree, but that's not how the mores and norms of the internet work today. Signal doesn't get to declare me a criminal if I write my own client software to talk to the Signal API servers (or use some other open source software I found), regardless of Moxie's squeaking. Either your service is public and open to everyone, or it isn't.
Renaud 6y ago
Would Firefox Sync be an alternative? It could allow transparent use of Firefox and Chromium data with the same account with history, passwords, bookmarks shared and the rest of the options and add-ons segregated by browser. Firefox sync also has "Send Tabs", which -to me- is a great feature.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  Yes. I'd love to see a Firefox Sync implementation for Chromium, which would make it easier for people who use Firefox but occasionally need to run Chromium to open something that doesn't bother to handle browser compatibility.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Potentially, but when I looked at Firefox sync to see if I could implement a custom version, the spec was kind of crazy complex.
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    GNOME Web has implemented it though, so that could give some hope that this is feasible for Chromium as well.
- yepguy 6y ago
  Brave Sync would probably be a better fit. Brave is already built on top of Chromium, it's open source, and they recently "rebuilt [it] to be more directly compatible with the Chromium sync system" [1]. It's also E2EE and doesn't require an account. [1]: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047642371-Sync-FAQ https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047642371-Syn...
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    Brave will sue you if you try to use its services with a different browser. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269890055822118912?s=20 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269890055822118912?s...
wooque 6y ago
Wait? There are people that willingly upload all their browser data to Google?
rbut 6y ago
Floccus is a good self-hosted open-source alternative for syncing bookmarks across browsers. There is a docker available to use their WebDAV, or you can use your own. https://floccus.org/ https://floccus.org/
Triv888 6y ago
I wish that they would remove everything Google related in Chromium... that's a start...
corv 6y ago
What to use for syncing between Chromium (Ungoogled) and iOS? I was never interested in syncing to Google in the first place
- horlux 6y ago
  firefox
  - corv 6y ago
    It's really just bookmarks I'm missing. Besides, Firefox isn't all that well integrated with iOS either
dartharva 6y ago
I don't understand why people are upset by this. The one reason I use Chromium instead of Chrome is reduced Google interception. If you really wanted Google sync you'd just use Chrome, why bother with using Chromium when you're going to let Google in anyway?
- haram_masala 6y ago
  Agreed. Seems like a small intersection of users who would be genuinely inconvenienced by this.
  - jhoechtl 6y ago
    Like me? I liked tje idea of leaving a tab open on desktop to find it later on my mobile device.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      The point here is if you are using Chromium and signing in with your Google account you might as well just use Chrome.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  My guess is some people still think you can sip from the Google fountain without getting tainted. Sort of like people who think you can safely syphon gasoline by sucking on the end of a hose.
  - 14 6y ago
    I can safely siphon gasoline by sucking the end of a hose but it didn’t come without gas in my mouth many times first. And don’t inhale you are priming it with creating a negative pressure in your mouth but don’t actually inhale. You should not be getting gas in your mouth if done correctly. I have had a lot of cars die on a full tank of gas and not wanting to waste have had my share of syphoning. A clear hose helps as well but often lack the rigidity to get around corners or bends before the tank. Now they have Gastapper a gas transfer pump that runs off 12 volts. It comes with everything to take that gas even the stuff needed to bypass the springs and such newer cars have blocking hoses.
wejick 6y ago
Does that means chromium people start to integrate with mozilla sync?
jhoechtl 6y ago
I only recently switched to the Brave browser. I guess this will affect any Chrome based browser? I predict next comes cutting them from access to the play store.
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  No. Brave has its own sync and doesn't use Google services for that. This change mostly affects open-source chromium packages in linux distros.
herpderperator 6y ago
If I'm reading this right, it means the custom Chromium build I use[0] won't work like I want it to anymore. Although not required if you want to be "ungoogled" which many here do, I personally set up all the required API keys against my personal account as per their guide[1] so that Chromium works like Google Chrome as much as possible, since that's the browser I otherwise use. The issue is that now I can't have hardware-accelerated graphics on Chrome on Linux (since they refuse to put that in their mainline build[2]) and have it be synced in the same way as the official browser, since they're removing syncing from Chromium. After reading the email[3] they sent out to Slackware devs, it's not clear if they are just removing this ability for builds that have keys built in, or if they are completely removing the ability to add your own keys to Chromium like I have in my example above. Could someone help clarify this? [0] https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-dev https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-... [1] https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440 [3] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/NXm7GIKTNTE?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/NX...
- vetinari 6y ago
  The video hardware acceleration decode is finally in 88. It is behind a flag that you have to enable in chrome://flags, but it is there.
- exikyut 6y ago
  Things may continue to work: > we'll limit the quota to the quota for development It remains to be seen whether new API keys will be able to be generated.
- xfalcox 6y ago
  Firefox have video acceleration on Linux, and it works great for me.
- usepgp 6y ago
  [2] is a really old bug. It should be enabled behind the #enable-accelerated-video-decode flag
thayne 6y ago
I occasionally get frustrated with bugs, missing features, or sites that don't work on Firefox, and toy with the idea of switching back to chromium, then there is stuff like this and manifest v3, and Firefox starts looking pretty good again.
throw14082020 6y ago
This may be a positive in the long run. Google continues to disproportionately piss off people who the power to do something about it, by making Chromium less appealing. Of course many will go back to Chrome, but hopefully a significant amount of people will work on technology outside Google, making the internet a better place.
eqtn 6y ago
What about chrome webstore access for chromium or other chromium based browsers(edge, brave, vivaldi, etc)
EastSmith 6y ago
Is there a complete list of APIs?
sneak 6y ago
This is probably a good thing. If you're not using Chrome proper, you likely have a reason for using Chromium, and Google's sync is not, by default, end to end encrypted (the key is derived from your Google account pass phrase which Google regularly has access to). We really should be decoupling the use of Google software from Google services.
abridgett 6y ago
I hate to bring up the "don't be evil" mantra. That seems long in the past, however I do wonder what the impact is on hiring and retention. Many people I know have certain moral beliefs that mean that they would never work for certain companies, examples would be: - military - pornography - social manipulation (i.e. Facebook) - work practices and worker rights (i.e. Amazon) - proprietary approach (i.e. Apple) - lack of open source contributions
- pram 6y ago
  uh huh. 'proprietary approach' would exclude the majority of software companies in existence
  - seba_dos1 6y ago
    It does. But there is still the other minority that one can work for.
- local_dev 6y ago
  I know I'm just one data point, but I've been turning down recent Google attempts to hire me precisely because of situations like this. And no, I don't mean just "Hey, we have a few openings, want to interview?", but specific requests because of my skillset. If you would have told me 5 years ago that today I would hold this opinion of Google, I would have laughed in your face. Today, Google is in the same tier as Facebook, my never companies.
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
why don't the chromium forks switch to firefox? or is it that doing so would hurt their egos?
bsclifton 6y ago
It would take require changes to Chromium (with regards to authentication), but Brave's sync server is open source and protocol-wise mostly compatible (client side encryption is enforced): https://github.com/brave/go-sync https://github.com/brave/go-sync I doubt Chromium authors would accept changes to authentication (even if you put guards around it like `#ifndef GOOGLE_CHROME_BRANDING`). If there were a 100% compatible service available, you can change the service URL using CLI arg `--sync-url` There is also a local sync backend which is interesting as it writes to disk. You could potentially sync this via OneDrive or something similar. You can enable with the CLI arg `--enable-local-sync-backend`. Directory settable using `--local-sync-backend-dir` You can watch the data being synced via chrome://sync-internals
yummybear 6y ago
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
pjmlp 6y ago
Just use Firefox, instead of contributing to ChromeOSiffication of the Web.
arcbyte 6y ago
Time for you all to switch to Firefox or Brave like the rest of us!
- ta988 6y ago
  Isn't Brave yet another adware? I thought they had identifying tokens and were editing urls to put their affiliates codes? Or did they stop doing those horrors?
  - bsclifton 6y ago
    The affiliate autocomplete problem was acknowledged as a mistake and removed. More info at https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
    - ta988 6y ago
      thanks for the update
jll29 6y ago
I'll keep using Chromium rather than Chrome. I don't need sync that badly. If enough people are fed up by Google's cut, they will probably build an open alternative soon... But we can see a pattern: if you rely on companies (either as a paying customer or as a user of their open free APIs or source offering), you may be let down. Can't happen to open community projects like Wikipedia (happy birthday, btw!). So a major reason (for anyone, certainly for me) to use open projects is continuity! Anythink proprietary can go anytime.

430 points by stsewd 6y ago

I wonder if this is a reaction to Chromium-based Edge overtaking Internet Exploder as the most popular Microsoft browser. Edit: I guess maybe not.

butz 6y ago
Didn't Microsoft replace all Google APIs with its own alternatives? This change probably will have bigger impact for other browsers built on Chromium, like Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc.
- cheph 6y ago
  Pretty sure Opera, Vivaldi and Brave does not sync to google servers. The syncing to their servers will still work fine AFAIU.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    Yeah as far as I know every major Chromium browser has their own system. Why would they want to use Google's system?
    - sirius87 6y ago
      Chromium would have to safely store and manage user data on their servers, which is an additional cost.
  - lscotte 6y ago
    Can't speak for the others, but Brave uses it's own sync system and is not affected by this.
- sirius87 6y ago
  Vivaldi syncs with their own servers, and it syncs a lot more data - such as notes - like in the Opera 12.x days.
cheph 6y ago
Pretty sure Chromium based edge does not sync to google > 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. I actually use this for having one google profile running in two browsers on one computer (one with a proxy, one without). Sucks quite a bit as this is the primary sync system for Chromium. You can run your own but that is not quite that nice.
- jeremydw 6y ago
  Instead of running Chrome and Chromium, try Chrome and Chrome Beta (or Dev/Nightly)? You can run the same profile in both and have two instances open.
  - cheph 6y ago
    Thanks for the tip, worked like a charm. I was worried that the icons would be the same, but they are not, so it is same user experience basically.

kowlo 6y ago

> There is no good reason for Google to do this, other than to force people to use Chrome. Sounds like a good reason (for them) to me! I've not used Chrome or Chromium for a while... nowadays it's between Safari and Firefox for me.

coding123 6y ago

This is actually a good thing. People shouldn't be syncing ANYTHING with google :)

andrewinardeer 6y ago
Let people choose what to do.
- canofbars 6y ago
  They can choose to use chrome I guess. If you don't trust chrome, why would you trust google sync to save all of your data to their servers.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    Chromium has open source value besides "not Google".
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  Pushing people to take uninformed choices is a so-called dark pattern.
- naringas 6y ago
  but make certain choices easier, much easier. just use chrome, it's just less of a hassle. I dubbed this "convenience herding". nobody is forcing you to do anything; they are just making some things very very inconvenient relative to how easy it's to just put it all in their servers or use their software (the cloud is an euphemism for not your computer)
  - foolmeonce 6y ago
    Yes, but they have been simultaneously making it very hard not to use their sign-in your browser and sync everything. If they actually revert chromium to not having any of this, they have the problem that they are building a path that works for a lot of people and takes us further away from chrome. It will be politically bad if they dead end that path, but a politically bad end is not unlikely.

bluewalt 6y ago

Does it mean the end of browsers like Brave?

dvcrn 6y ago
Brave doesn’t use googles sync
lscotte 6y ago
No.

teraflop 6y ago

Here is the discussion on the Chromium embedder-dev mailing list: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/NXm7GIKTNTE https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/NX... Most interesting to me is that even though the Chrome team specifically provided API keys for open-source Chromium builds to use back in 2013, they are now claiming that "the Terms of Service don't allow this usage, and [the previous developer] didn't have authority to change the terms."

izacus 6y ago
The way Google is communicating in that topic is downright horrible - like talking to a corporate robot. Hiring Oracle managers is seriously starting to show it seems.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Don't blame Oracle for this. Page/Pichai sign off on these plans.
  - paxys 6y ago
    I highly doubt this decision went all the way up to Page or Pichai.
    - x0x0 6y ago
      I would be surprised if, given the antitrust sensitivity around chrome, these decisions aren't being approved at a very high level.
      - jfrunyon 6y ago
        That would ruin their plausible deniability.
        wegs 6y ago
        My experience from other organizations: * Corruption runs to the top. * The top is very careful to communicate verbally, through implications, or otherwise. Dunno about Google.

juancn 6y ago

This makes sense from a support point of view. Supporting non-standard configurations costs money (both in direct and indirect ways, such as developer attention and time lost triaging bugs, etc.), they don't want to spend the money on it.

callmeal 6y ago
>This makes sense from a support point of view. Support? Isn't this google we're talking about?
- geek_at 6y ago
  they need two whole server racks to process the auto-delete function that runs their support email backend ;)
- izacus 6y ago
  Do you expect Google (or any other publicly traded corpo facing pressure from shareholders) to finance hosting of competing products? I don't think it's a reasonable expectation from US corporations so we need to take their marketing with a grain of salt.
  - m-p-3 6y ago
    All the major Chrome-like competitors like Brave and Edge already uses their own sync engine, so the only users they're punishing are the users of Chromium.
MPSimmons 6y ago
What support does Google offer for this?
snoshy 6y ago
There's nothing non-standard about this. The API keys to enable this functionality were provided by Google itself in 2013.

jsnell 6y ago

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801113

santoshalper 6y ago

Man, the "don't be evil" days seem like so long ago.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

Is the sync protocol documented? Can you just use an alternative server of some kind? Does vanilla Chromium try to sync at all now? Does it silently fail, loudly fail, or just never try?

steren 6y ago
Looks like it is? https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync And even if not, since the client is OSS, it can be inferred.
nullify88 6y ago
There used to be a Python sync server used in the Chromium project that was used to test sync functionality. Someone discovered this and yanked out the relevant code to enable self hosting. https://github.com/infeeeee/chrome-sync-server https://github.com/infeeeee/chrome-sync-server Though its since been replaced by some c++ fake server. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/master/components/sync/test/fake_server/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/he...

salusinarduis 6y ago

This is great. Never understood why that proprietary system was in Chromium to begin with.

Arnavion 6y ago
Yeah. For users that had to worry about disabling these features for privacy, now they can rest assured the features won't work even if they wanted to.
bzb6 6y ago
If the client implementation is public then there’s nothing stopping you from developing a server.
- mmmeff 6y ago
  To be fair, it's a helluva lot more work to reverse engineer the server implementation from the client than it is to build a client for an open source server.f

abrowne 6y ago

I won't miss sync (I don't use it), but I'll miss the Google Translate feature.

hedgehog 6y ago

"Users of products that are incorrectly using these APIs"... This might be the right thing for them to do but what an incredibly arrogant way to word the e-mail.

teraflop 6y ago
Especially given that Chromium distributors had previously been given explicit permission to use the sync APIs.

qwerty456127 6y ago

Why would anybody insist on using them? Isn't there enough of 3-rd party cross-browser bookmark/passwords/whatever syncing tools available?

katsura 6y ago
Because I can share pages between my phone and my laptop with a few taps, without copy/pasting the links between different services. Edit: just to clarify, I have an iPhone, and I run Linux on my laptop. Whenever I tried using Firefox on my phone, I had a bunch of problems with it, so it is quite limited what I can use to sync between my two devices.
- m-p-3 6y ago
  I have Android on my phone and sending a page to it isn't as seamless as I'd expect, like it sometimes either takes a while or I have to go in my Firefox Sync settings and force a refresh to get the page.
  - qwerty456127 6y ago
    I just share whatever I want with myself in Telegram.
    - toyg 6y ago
      That... I should have thought of that a long time ago. FF is great but the "send to device" feature has not worked for me in years. I suspect it got confused when I migrated my Apple profile to a new phone.
      - m-p-3 6y ago
        I alternatively do the same with Signal and the "Note to Self" conversation.
- kovac 6y ago
  Can't you just "share" the page via email, a messenger or a cloud drive? This is what I usually do. I use Vivaldi and Brave but I've never used sync feature of any browser I've used.

AnssiH 6y ago

Huh? The title seems inaccurate to me, considering the page says: > Google isn't shutting off the API access until March 15, 2021, but I have gone ahead and disabled it starting with this update. So it seems to be that Fedora has turned the features off early, and Google has not (yet). (at the time of writing the title says "Google has turned off")

canofbars 6y ago
The difference is somewhat meaningless. It will be gone very soon regardless of what fedora does. Cutting it off early means they can time it with a release so people get the release notes rather than it just stopping working without having updated.

drdavid 6y ago

It has been like that in (my) Linux for a long time? This isn't new by any means. Lemme check. Current version: Version 88.0.4324.50 (Developer Build) Ubuntu 18.04 (64-bit) It looks like I installed this OS in July of this year, which means Chromium would have been installed in July of this year - the 5th to be exact. When started, it gives a warning about not having certain APIs and lacking functionality because of this. It has done that since at least July of this year. I'm sure it did so before that, but I can only show that I've had this installed since July of this year. This isn't even remotely new. Whatever version it was that I installed back in July did the same thing, or should I say didn't do the same thing? It hasn't had sync enabled since day one. I currently have Lubuntu 18.04 and Chromium is installed by way of .deb channels - not a snap.

rektide 6y ago

i'd be lovely to see a write up on what the implementation does, how it transfers data. is there grpc? i feel like there's going to be grpc. what kind of endpoints does it talk with? can anyone find the old #xmpp based sync-code in the source code archives? it'd be fun to compare how sync used to work on the old semi-xmpp based platform versus how it works now. that this sync used to built somewhat around xmpp always fascinated me but i never dug in. there's got to be some neat interesting morsels in the code, around this, if we go looking for it. there also used to be a very unsophisticated demo sync server one could run themselves[1]! i kept thinking/wishing people would take this & run with it, stop sending their core data to google, own the stack, own their systems, take responsibility, possibly expand & innovate openly on sync. it always seemed logical & obvious, but i didn't ever do it myself, & best i can tell, no one else really did either. fwiw, the interfaces are part of the open source code[2], then & now, i believe, but the specific implementation is unavailable. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/614744/how-to-set-up-a-own-chrome-sync-server https://superuser.com/questions/614744/how-to-set-up-a-own-c... [2] https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync

manuel_w 6y ago

If you want to synchronize your bookmarks across devices and even browsers, you may want to look at https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ https://www.xbrowsersync.org/. It doesn't require registration. The clients you would like to sync just need to enter the same sync id and password. If I understand right, the password is used to encrypt your data on client-side. The server (called "service" in xbrowsersync lingo) only sees an anonymous sync id with a binary blob it can't read. If a sync id is not used for a while, the associated stored data gets deleted. That's it. There is no "account" in the traditional sense. I really like this simplistic approach. It's even open-source. You don't need to use the default https://api.xbrowsersync.org https://api.xbrowsersync.org service but can also host it yourself. I'm using it and it works quite good. Every now and then sync fails, but I think I narrowed it down: It fails only when you create a bookmark in a just-created directory. But am not sure and didn't file a bug report, though.

1996 6y ago
Does it work with chromium variants, like edge? What about for "collections"? Under the hood, it mustn't be so different from bookmarks.
- manuel_w 6y ago
  Chromium variants: Edge support is planned for v1.6.0. (https://github.com/xbrowsersync/app/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/xbrowsersync/app/wiki/Roadmap) v1.5.2 is the current version. Collections: Don't know, I'm not using collections.
- rbut 6y ago
  Floccus works with chromium variants like edge. https://floccus.org/ https://floccus.org/
hrez 6y ago
I'll add that it works well across chrome/brave/firefox. You can self-host it with 3d party https://github.com/ishani/xSyn https://github.com/ishani/xSyn Which is written in go so it's as simple as running a binary.
6y ago

arexxbifs 6y ago

Does this mean Chromium will be "ungoogled"[0] by default? [0] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#key-features https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#key-features

paxys 6y ago

If you want to use a Google account and Google sync/other services you may as well just use Chrome anyways. To me the entire point of packaged Chromium is that it is Google-free.

zamadatix 6y ago
It's entirely the point until it isn't, such as when you (or the distro package maintainer) want's to change something only available in compile time. E.g. up until recently I had to compile with certain options to be able to pass the runtime flag for native Wayland integration.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Or of course the many benefits of free software that many champion yet strangely never use and simultaneously become confused at when someone else do. The number of times I've seen Reddit's r/linux users react with confusion to ire when someone actually makes changes to the source code to suit his own personal needs is bizarrely large.

jfrunyon 6y ago

> To reiterate, the APIs were not designed to be used by third-party software, so short of a complete rewrite, there is no unfortunately no option. The unfortunate (for Google) reality is (as had already been pointed out to this fellow multiple times before he said that): whether they turn off these Linux distros' keys, people can still write third-party software to (ab)use these APIs, using Google's own keys. The CFAA is only going to keep legit uses from using Google's keys. This does not, in any way, fix the issue that Google is claiming it fixes.

IshKebab 6y ago
I think you misunderstand Google's intention. They want to prevent competitor browsers from using these APIs so people are forced to use Chrome (and it probably relieves some backwards compatibility work too). Yes, you can steal Chrome's keys, but Google can easily update those in Chrome. Are you going to write an automated system to extract the keys from Chrome on every update? Doubtful. This stops browsers like Opera and Brave from using the APIs.
- oss2020 6y ago
  Brave and Opera both use their own solutions for syncing. In fact, can anyone name a browser except Chromium that uses Chrome's sync servers for syncing? Because I can't. Also your point about backwards compatibility doesn't really make sense as Google has plenty of ways to detect browser version and capabilities of the sync engine (the sync engine sends that info to the sync server voluntarily right now). Also Google can't just disable it's own API keys every time there is an update because this would shut down a large number of it's own users too. They would need to wait at least 1-3 months to avoid larger disruptions and this would give others more than enough time to fetch the latest keys (and if there is interest, there will always be someone who does that and posts them).
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    > Also Google can't just disable it's own API keys every time there is an update because this would shut down a large number of it's own users too. It can because the official Chrome auto-updates very reliably. They only have to support a few versions back. They could even force updates if they wanted. None of that is true for Chromium. Do they really want to support the 10 year old Chromium from Debian stable?

jfrunyon 6y ago

> > I am considering an alternative approach to just stopping with my Slackware packages - and that is to inform my users about the public availability of Google's own API keys, plus the fact that you just have to export them in your shell environment as values for the GOOGLE_API_KEY, GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_SECRET variables before you start Chromium. > That would still be prohibited by our policies, and may be broken in the future without notice. How on earth would that possibly be prohibited by their policies? Google's users using Google's service for personal use consistent with Google's terms is prohibited by their policies?

simcop2387 6y ago
Doing so with unauthorized software is against their policies
- sneak 6y ago
  That's not how network services work. If a person is authorized to make the API call, the person is authorized to make the API call. Service operators are not permitted in law to dictate client software, outside of copyright license terms.
  - t0mas88 6y ago
    While that would be a great law to have I don't think it exists. If I make an API for my own client software and put in the terms that you can only use my system in the combination in which I provide it, I think you're out of luck. The only law I can think of that could get involved is the DMCA. If my client implements usage/content restrictions (very stupid design) you using the API with another program in violation of the terms could be considered circumventing the content restrictions and that's illegal due to the DMCA.
    - sneak 6y ago
      You seem to be conflating the DMCA, which regulates copying of copyrighted material, and the CFAA, which criminalizes unauthorized access. I don't think there is any case law related to "which client was used" applications of the CFAA. I can't really imagine any reasonable circumstance where someone would be authorized with one client and unauthorized with another. It's not really a reasonable position; if you offer a free network service on the internet, and anyone is authorized to use it, I don't know of any legal basis for gating that authorization on "user of your software". Perhaps some internet-clueless judge will one day disagree, but that's not how the mores and norms of the internet work today. Signal doesn't get to declare me a criminal if I write my own client software to talk to the Signal API servers (or use some other open source software I found), regardless of Moxie's squeaking. Either your service is public and open to everyone, or it isn't.

Renaud 6y ago

Would Firefox Sync be an alternative? It could allow transparent use of Firefox and Chromium data with the same account with history, passwords, bookmarks shared and the rest of the options and add-ons segregated by browser. Firefox sync also has "Send Tabs", which -to me- is a great feature.

JoshTriplett 6y ago
Yes. I'd love to see a Firefox Sync implementation for Chromium, which would make it easier for people who use Firefox but occasionally need to run Chromium to open something that doesn't bother to handle browser compatibility.
Aeolun 6y ago
Potentially, but when I looked at Firefox sync to see if I could implement a custom version, the spec was kind of crazy complex.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  GNOME Web has implemented it though, so that could give some hope that this is feasible for Chromium as well.
yepguy 6y ago
Brave Sync would probably be a better fit. Brave is already built on top of Chromium, it's open source, and they recently "rebuilt [it] to be more directly compatible with the Chromium sync system" [1]. It's also E2EE and doesn't require an account. [1]: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047642371-Sync-FAQ https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047642371-Syn...
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  Brave will sue you if you try to use its services with a different browser. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269890055822118912?s=20 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269890055822118912?s...

wooque 6y ago

Wait? There are people that willingly upload all their browser data to Google?

rbut 6y ago

Floccus is a good self-hosted open-source alternative for syncing bookmarks across browsers. There is a docker available to use their WebDAV, or you can use your own. https://floccus.org/ https://floccus.org/

Triv888 6y ago

I wish that they would remove everything Google related in Chromium... that's a start...

corv 6y ago

What to use for syncing between Chromium (Ungoogled) and iOS? I was never interested in syncing to Google in the first place

horlux 6y ago
firefox
- corv 6y ago
  It's really just bookmarks I'm missing. Besides, Firefox isn't all that well integrated with iOS either

dartharva 6y ago

I don't understand why people are upset by this. The one reason I use Chromium instead of Chrome is reduced Google interception. If you really wanted Google sync you'd just use Chrome, why bother with using Chromium when you're going to let Google in anyway?

haram_masala 6y ago
Agreed. Seems like a small intersection of users who would be genuinely inconvenienced by this.
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  Like me? I liked tje idea of leaving a tab open on desktop to find it later on my mobile device.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    The point here is if you are using Chromium and signing in with your Google account you might as well just use Chrome.
ogre_codes 6y ago
My guess is some people still think you can sip from the Google fountain without getting tainted. Sort of like people who think you can safely syphon gasoline by sucking on the end of a hose.
- 14 6y ago
  I can safely siphon gasoline by sucking the end of a hose but it didn’t come without gas in my mouth many times first. And don’t inhale you are priming it with creating a negative pressure in your mouth but don’t actually inhale. You should not be getting gas in your mouth if done correctly. I have had a lot of cars die on a full tank of gas and not wanting to waste have had my share of syphoning. A clear hose helps as well but often lack the rigidity to get around corners or bends before the tank. Now they have Gastapper a gas transfer pump that runs off 12 volts. It comes with everything to take that gas even the stuff needed to bypass the springs and such newer cars have blocking hoses.

wejick 6y ago

Does that means chromium people start to integrate with mozilla sync?

jhoechtl 6y ago

I only recently switched to the Brave browser. I guess this will affect any Chrome based browser? I predict next comes cutting them from access to the play store.

d3nj4l 6y ago
No. Brave has its own sync and doesn't use Google services for that. This change mostly affects open-source chromium packages in linux distros.

herpderperator 6y ago

If I'm reading this right, it means the custom Chromium build I use[0] won't work like I want it to anymore. Although not required if you want to be "ungoogled" which many here do, I personally set up all the required API keys against my personal account as per their guide[1] so that Chromium works like Google Chrome as much as possible, since that's the browser I otherwise use. The issue is that now I can't have hardware-accelerated graphics on Chrome on Linux (since they refuse to put that in their mainline build[2]) and have it be synced in the same way as the official browser, since they're removing syncing from Chromium. After reading the email[3] they sent out to Slackware devs, it's not clear if they are just removing this ability for builds that have keys built in, or if they are completely removing the ability to add your own keys to Chromium like I have in my example above. Could someone help clarify this? [0] https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-dev https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-... [1] https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440 [3] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/NXm7GIKTNTE?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/NX...

vetinari 6y ago
The video hardware acceleration decode is finally in 88. It is behind a flag that you have to enable in chrome://flags, but it is there.
exikyut 6y ago
Things may continue to work: > we'll limit the quota to the quota for development It remains to be seen whether new API keys will be able to be generated.
xfalcox 6y ago
Firefox have video acceleration on Linux, and it works great for me.
usepgp 6y ago
[2] is a really old bug. It should be enabled behind the #enable-accelerated-video-decode flag

thayne 6y ago

I occasionally get frustrated with bugs, missing features, or sites that don't work on Firefox, and toy with the idea of switching back to chromium, then there is stuff like this and manifest v3, and Firefox starts looking pretty good again.

throw14082020 6y ago

This may be a positive in the long run. Google continues to disproportionately piss off people who the power to do something about it, by making Chromium less appealing. Of course many will go back to Chrome, but hopefully a significant amount of people will work on technology outside Google, making the internet a better place.

eqtn 6y ago

What about chrome webstore access for chromium or other chromium based browsers(edge, brave, vivaldi, etc)

EastSmith 6y ago

Is there a complete list of APIs?

sneak 6y ago

This is probably a good thing. If you're not using Chrome proper, you likely have a reason for using Chromium, and Google's sync is not, by default, end to end encrypted (the key is derived from your Google account pass phrase which Google regularly has access to). We really should be decoupling the use of Google software from Google services.

abridgett 6y ago

I hate to bring up the "don't be evil" mantra. That seems long in the past, however I do wonder what the impact is on hiring and retention. Many people I know have certain moral beliefs that mean that they would never work for certain companies, examples would be: - military - pornography - social manipulation (i.e. Facebook) - work practices and worker rights (i.e. Amazon) - proprietary approach (i.e. Apple) - lack of open source contributions

pram 6y ago
uh huh. 'proprietary approach' would exclude the majority of software companies in existence
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  It does. But there is still the other minority that one can work for.
local_dev 6y ago
I know I'm just one data point, but I've been turning down recent Google attempts to hire me precisely because of situations like this. And no, I don't mean just "Hey, we have a few openings, want to interview?", but specific requests because of my skillset. If you would have told me 5 years ago that today I would hold this opinion of Google, I would have laughed in your face. Today, Google is in the same tier as Facebook, my never companies.

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

why don't the chromium forks switch to firefox? or is it that doing so would hurt their egos?

bsclifton 6y ago

It would take require changes to Chromium (with regards to authentication), but Brave's sync server is open source and protocol-wise mostly compatible (client side encryption is enforced): https://github.com/brave/go-sync https://github.com/brave/go-sync I doubt Chromium authors would accept changes to authentication (even if you put guards around it like `#ifndef GOOGLE_CHROME_BRANDING`). If there were a 100% compatible service available, you can change the service URL using CLI arg `--sync-url` There is also a local sync backend which is interesting as it writes to disk. You could potentially sync this via OneDrive or something similar. You can enable with the CLI arg `--enable-local-sync-backend`. Directory settable using `--local-sync-backend-dir` You can watch the data being synced via chrome://sync-internals

yummybear 6y ago

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

pjmlp 6y ago

Just use Firefox, instead of contributing to ChromeOSiffication of the Web.

arcbyte 6y ago

Time for you all to switch to Firefox or Brave like the rest of us!

ta988 6y ago
Isn't Brave yet another adware? I thought they had identifying tokens and were editing urls to put their affiliates codes? Or did they stop doing those horrors?
- bsclifton 6y ago
  The affiliate autocomplete problem was acknowledged as a mistake and removed. More info at https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
  - ta988 6y ago
    thanks for the update

jll29 6y ago

I'll keep using Chromium rather than Chrome. I don't need sync that badly. If enough people are fed up by Google's cut, they will probably build an open alternative soon... But we can see a pattern: if you rely on companies (either as a paying customer or as a user of their open free APIs or source offering), you may be let down. Can't happen to open community projects like Wikipedia (happy birthday, btw!). So a major reason (for anyone, certainly for me) to use open projects is continuity! Anythink proprietary can go anytime.