

- #Chromium browsers build themselves each time code
- #Chromium browsers build themselves each time free
He was granted “official permission to include Google API keys in your packages”, and was told that the usage quota for that particular key would be increased “in an effort to adequately support your users”, as normally the key he was assigned would only be for personal development use. You might think that’s just one of the risks you take on when supporting a BSD-licensed project, which by definition offers no implied warranty, but in this case things are a little less cut and dry.Īs developer Eric Hameleers explains in a lengthy blog post, he was supplied with a dedicated API key for his Slackware Chromium builds by the Google Chrome Team in 2013. They’ve put in considerable time and effort to compile, distribute, and support a custom built Chromium, only to have Google pull the rug out from under them without so much as a call for comments. The people that are actually hurt the most by this decision are the ones who’ve spent years packaging Google’s open source browser. For those users, it may be time to give Firefox a shot. They also don’t provide a native BSD build at the time of this writing. Those running older machines may be in for a rude awaking however, as Google no longer makes 32-bit builds available. Sure it was nice to have Chromium available in your distribution’s package repository, but popping over to the official website and downloading the latest stable is hardly the end of the world. With a Google representative confirming the change is coming regardless of community feedback, it seems likely more distributions will follow suit.įor most users, this is little more than a minor annoyance. Unhappy with the idea of giving users a semi-functional browser, the Chromium maintainers for several distributions such as Arch Linux and Fedora have said they’re considering pulling the package from their respective repositories altogether. With that simple change, anyone using a distribution-specific build of Chromium just became persona non grata. But the search giant is also using this opportunity to codify their belief that the only official Chromium builds are the ones that they provide themselves. The language used in the post makes it sound like Google is referring to browsers which are spun off of the Chromium codebase, and at least in part, they are.

In fact, you might even assume it doesn’t apply to you.

To the average Chromium user, this doesn’t sound like much of a problem. In response, any browser attempting to access features such as Chrome Sync with an unofficial API key would be prevented from doing so after March 15th. Unfortunately, that may be changing soon.Ī post made earlier this month to the official Chromium Blog explained that an audit had determined “third-party Chromium based browsers” were using APIs that were intended only for Google’s internal use. As such, most distributions offer their own package for the browser and some even include it in the base install.
#Chromium browsers build themselves each time code
Since the project’s inception over a decade ago, users have been able to compile the BSD licensed code into a browser that’s almost the same as the closed-source Chrome.
#Chromium browsers build themselves each time free
Linux users are more likely than most to be familiar with Chromium, Google’s the free and open source web project that serves as the basis for their wildly popular Chrome.
