Thread by @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).

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.

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.

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.

I am seriously reconsidering whether there is any value in a crippled version of Chromium remaining in Fedora/EPEL.

@googleOSS, it is not too late to fix this.

P.S. The official Chrome API keys which will permit this usage have been known since 2013 (they're embedded in every Chrome binary). It would be terrible if everyone used them instead.

github.com/adobe/chromium…

P.P.S. In case your response is "oh sad, but I don't use Fedora, I use <OTHERLINUX>" ... guess what. They're affected too. If you use BSD, also affected. If you build your own copy of Chromium for your own bespoke OS? Affected.