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Congratulations! And thank you for the great write-up. I work with the Chromium code base a lot, and it can indeed be daunting. I use Sublime Text, which treats

Congratulations! And thank you for the great write-up. I work with the Chromium code base a lot, and it can indeed be daunting. I use Sublime Text, which treats the code as plain text, apart from syntax highlighting. But it's also possible with at least VS Code to get some more intelligence, such as going to the definition or declaration of a function, etc. People who have now become interested in creating their own Chromium-based browser may want to take a look at my article: https://omaha-consulting.com/how-to-fork-chromium https://omaha-consulting.com/how-to-fork-chromium. It gives a high-level view of what goes into maintaining a Chromium fork.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Reminds me of my early experience with larger-scale JS development (early single page apps or whatever they're called now); there were no good IDEs yet, no module / require system, no types or whatever. Sublime Text and fast global search were my go-to tools, and it gave me a newfound appreciation of consistent naming schemes and structures. Not so much nowadays though, most of the time I use IDEA with Typescript and the like. And yet, I still feel like I lost something moving away from sublime. I've reinstalled and am trying it again lately.
- frou_dh 2y ago
  Sublime Text has had some IDE-like abilities even before the LSP plugin, because its own filesystem code indexer reuses the syntax-highlighting language grammars to power best-effort goto-definition / goto-references functionality. How well that actually works varies by language.
KolmogorovComp 2y ago
From your post > you will (...) want to change the name of your browser [to] "Browser of Bliss" instead of as "Chromium". You will find that this is already hard to do. The browser name is hard-coded in many places in the millions of lines of Chromium source code. (...) Viasat are offering a (...) fork called Rebel that makes this easier I am surprised that kind of change has not been upstreamed, or is Google actively working against forks?
- Vinnl 2y ago
  I'd also be surprised if that browser name is "Chromium", given that Google Chrome doesn't brand itself as such. (And vice versa.)
- mherrmann 2y ago
  It depends on the individual part of Chromium. Some teams seem to be much more open to contributions than others. (I believe to recall that this is also what someone at Viasat told me at some point, but I'm not sure). Also, for example the browser name appears in a lot of places. It is very hard to fully extract it into a single configurable option.
- benreesman 2y ago
  It’s just the kind of thing that happens in a huge, production codebase. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Google, but some strings in multiple places isn’t a good reason to be skeptical of the Chromium maintainers.
  - KolmogorovComp 2y ago
    I know it's naturally happening in a large codebase, I'm asking why they specifically maintain a fork just for that instead of trying to push what are probably easy (but tedious) upstream fixes.
    - poincaredisk 2y ago
      Purely guessing: abstracting a browser name is yet another abstraction layer. A later that is not needed by chromium. Maintainers of chromium primarily care about maintainability of chromium, not other forks.
      - throwaway35023 2y ago
        If the browser name is referenced in multiple places, it seems to me that by defining it in one place actually increases the maintainability.
bobajeff 2y ago
>So how much does it cost to maintain a Chromium fork? >It obviously depends on the number of customizations your browser has, and on how quickly you want to incorporate security fixes from upstream. Chromium is one of the world's most complex pieces of software, and you need very capable engineers and powerful hardware to match this. It is going to be expensive. And not just once, but also on an ongoing basis. This confirms my thoughts after I tried messing with chromium's and brave's code bases.
- aftbit 2y ago
  I dunno, I've maintained a personal fork since around Chrome 100 or so. I am only targeting builds on Linux, I don't care about branding, and my patches are limited to about 300 lines total. The initial fork and figuring out the build process took probably 20 hours. After that, I've only had to spend on average around one hour per release of "engineering time" to keep my patches current. The build takes about an hour of machine time on my 5950x. I'm not saying it's trivial by any means, but I don't think it's outside the range of a motivated hobbyist or a small startup. I don't think you really need "very capable engineers" personally. I barely know C or C++ and I haven't had too much trouble working with the codebase.
  - BonoboIO 2y ago
    Why are you running your own fork, if I may ask.
    - dankwizard 2y ago
      When you sit down at the dinner table, do you have your own fork or share one with the guests? Exact same logic applies.
      - RexM 2y ago
        Because you don’t want to share germs with other users of the browser? The logic makes no sense and I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking.
saagarjha 2y ago
I haven’t looked too closely at Chrome’s build process but there might be a way to get LSP or something set up for it?
- fpoling 2y ago
  For Chromium IntelliSence at least in the form of VSCode plug-in works pretty much out of the box with recent releases of VSCode. It is not as precise as clang LSP but the latter can easily consume over 10GB for Chromium.
atotic 2y ago
I was a C++ Chrome developer till 2020, and I primarily used Sublime Text because of speed, and I found VSCode weekly releases too distracting. I indexed code locally with CTags, and then used SublimeText CTags extension for navigation. This worked great for my local branches. When I needed to dig deep, I'd use source.chromium.org which indexes perfectly. # ctags command that indexes just Google's chrome code ctags --languages=C++ --exclude=third_party --exclude=.git --exclude=build --exclude=out --exclude=tools --exclude=mojo --exclude=base -R -f .tmp_tags ctags --languages=C++ -a -R -f .tmp_tags third_party/blink mv .tmp_tags .tags
- sevnin 2y ago
  Don't know on what version of Sublime you are but the newest release has indexing built-in and it works really well.
  - atotic 2y ago
    I am not sure if built-in indexing supports only indexing subset of the tree. YOu want to selectively index for speed and accuracy. The complete tree might contain multiple definitions of the same functions, as headers get copied, pre-processed, etc.
    - sevnin 2y ago
      It supports selective indexing, you can specify paths to exclude from indexing or you might open just a single module, here is more info: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/indexing.html https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/indexing.html

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

Reminds me of my early experience with larger-scale JS development (early single page apps or whatever they're called now); there were no good IDEs yet, no module / require system, no types or whatever. Sublime Text and fast global search were my go-to tools, and it gave me a newfound appreciation of consistent naming schemes and structures. Not so much nowadays though, most of the time I use IDEA with Typescript and the like. And yet, I still feel like I lost something moving away from sublime. I've reinstalled and am trying it again lately.

frou_dh 2y ago
Sublime Text has had some IDE-like abilities even before the LSP plugin, because its own filesystem code indexer reuses the syntax-highlighting language grammars to power best-effort goto-definition / goto-references functionality. How well that actually works varies by language.

KolmogorovComp 2y ago

From your post > you will (...) want to change the name of your browser [to] "Browser of Bliss" instead of as "Chromium". You will find that this is already hard to do. The browser name is hard-coded in many places in the millions of lines of Chromium source code. (...) Viasat are offering a (...) fork called Rebel that makes this easier I am surprised that kind of change has not been upstreamed, or is Google actively working against forks?

Vinnl 2y ago
I'd also be surprised if that browser name is "Chromium", given that Google Chrome doesn't brand itself as such. (And vice versa.)
mherrmann 2y ago
It depends on the individual part of Chromium. Some teams seem to be much more open to contributions than others. (I believe to recall that this is also what someone at Viasat told me at some point, but I'm not sure). Also, for example the browser name appears in a lot of places. It is very hard to fully extract it into a single configurable option.
benreesman 2y ago
It’s just the kind of thing that happens in a huge, production codebase. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Google, but some strings in multiple places isn’t a good reason to be skeptical of the Chromium maintainers.
- KolmogorovComp 2y ago
  I know it's naturally happening in a large codebase, I'm asking why they specifically maintain a fork just for that instead of trying to push what are probably easy (but tedious) upstream fixes.
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    Purely guessing: abstracting a browser name is yet another abstraction layer. A later that is not needed by chromium. Maintainers of chromium primarily care about maintainability of chromium, not other forks.
    - throwaway35023 2y ago
      If the browser name is referenced in multiple places, it seems to me that by defining it in one place actually increases the maintainability.

bobajeff 2y ago

>So how much does it cost to maintain a Chromium fork? >It obviously depends on the number of customizations your browser has, and on how quickly you want to incorporate security fixes from upstream. Chromium is one of the world's most complex pieces of software, and you need very capable engineers and powerful hardware to match this. It is going to be expensive. And not just once, but also on an ongoing basis. This confirms my thoughts after I tried messing with chromium's and brave's code bases.

aftbit 2y ago
I dunno, I've maintained a personal fork since around Chrome 100 or so. I am only targeting builds on Linux, I don't care about branding, and my patches are limited to about 300 lines total. The initial fork and figuring out the build process took probably 20 hours. After that, I've only had to spend on average around one hour per release of "engineering time" to keep my patches current. The build takes about an hour of machine time on my 5950x. I'm not saying it's trivial by any means, but I don't think it's outside the range of a motivated hobbyist or a small startup. I don't think you really need "very capable engineers" personally. I barely know C or C++ and I haven't had too much trouble working with the codebase.
- BonoboIO 2y ago
  Why are you running your own fork, if I may ask.
  - dankwizard 2y ago
    When you sit down at the dinner table, do you have your own fork or share one with the guests? Exact same logic applies.
    - RexM 2y ago
      Because you don’t want to share germs with other users of the browser? The logic makes no sense and I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking.

saagarjha 2y ago

I haven’t looked too closely at Chrome’s build process but there might be a way to get LSP or something set up for it?

fpoling 2y ago
For Chromium IntelliSence at least in the form of VSCode plug-in works pretty much out of the box with recent releases of VSCode. It is not as precise as clang LSP but the latter can easily consume over 10GB for Chromium.

atotic 2y ago

I was a C++ Chrome developer till 2020, and I primarily used Sublime Text because of speed, and I found VSCode weekly releases too distracting. I indexed code locally with CTags, and then used SublimeText CTags extension for navigation. This worked great for my local branches. When I needed to dig deep, I'd use source.chromium.org which indexes perfectly. # ctags command that indexes just Google's chrome code ctags --languages=C++ --exclude=third_party --exclude=.git --exclude=build --exclude=out --exclude=tools --exclude=mojo --exclude=base -R -f .tmp_tags ctags --languages=C++ -a -R -f .tmp_tags third_party/blink mv .tmp_tags .tags

sevnin 2y ago
Don't know on what version of Sublime you are but the newest release has indexing built-in and it works really well.
- atotic 2y ago
  I am not sure if built-in indexing supports only indexing subset of the tree. YOu want to selectively index for speed and accuracy. The complete tree might contain multiple definitions of the same functions, as headers get copied, pre-processed, etc.
  - sevnin 2y ago
    It supports selective indexing, you can specify paths to exclude from indexing or you might open just a single module, here is more info: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/indexing.html https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/indexing.html