No more google sync in chromium

raindog1975 · 2021-01-26 06:14:37

Has anybody seen this https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/chr … pi-removed ?. Are there any solutions ?

d_fajardo · 2021-01-26 06:37:03

As stated in the site, the solution is to use google-chrome in AUR if you don't mind using close-source.

WorMzy · 2021-01-26 08:24:20

Arch ML threads:
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/a … 30260.html
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/a … 48520.html

ugjka · 2021-01-26 09:04:41

I switched to google-chrome. If I want to use their services, might as well use their proprietary browser

raindog1975 · 2021-01-27 13:11:21

Thank you everybody for the replays. I'll try google-chrome ( I'm not sure if it will work with va-api but will see ).

raindog1975 · 2021-01-27 17:21:57

Just an update, google-chrome works with va-api, so I'll be using that until I find an open-source alternative.

icar · 2021-01-27 17:54:26

Brave works with vaapi too. Maybe it's time to consider alternatives to vanilla chromium.

eschwartz · 2021-01-28 05:00:18

raindog1975 wrote:

Just an update, google-chrome works with va-api, so I'll be using that until I find an open-source alternative.

Does Firefox count?

headkase · 2021-01-28 06:09:43

Microsoft Edge in the AUR is working great here too. It's only in dev version right now but the final product will have all the syncing features. Connected with your Microsoft account if you have other machines to make that convenient like I do.

micronetic · 2021-01-28 21:45:55

eschwartz wrote:

raindog1975 wrote:
Just an update, google-chrome works with va-api, so I'll be using that until I find an open-source alternative.
Does Firefox count?

Actually this is what I am going to do, haven't used Firefox in years as my main browser but Chromium. Now Firefox will be my main browser because I need the sync and Chromium just for web dev testing.

Last edited by micronetic (2021-01-28 21:47:43)

kokoko3k · 2021-01-29 06:45:07

Are the profiles between chrome and chromium compatible?
one can use chromium and switch to chrome just to update/sync the profile maybe

(happy firefox user here)

raindog1975 · 2021-01-29 11:24:52

Installed Brave last night , va-api works, profile-sync-daemon works, google-chrome is going to take a back seat : )

drcouzelis · 2021-01-29 14:15:54

As of Tuesday, I switch from Chromium to Firefox on Arch Linux, and from Bromium to Firefox. It's been a fine transition.

If my kids still need Chrome for school, I'll either keep Chromium installed or just install Google Chrome for them to use for now.

Awebb · 2021-01-29 20:10:28

On top of that #€&@!, Google has completely removed the support for Autofill providers for (at least) password in Android Chrome and Chromium, making it impossible to integrate anything but the Google password service comfortably. The only methods that work without any workarounds are manually searching keepass apps and this weird custom keyboard provided by KePassDX, that works and works not randomly.

I'm sick and tired of that mobile crap.

john beals · 2021-03-07 13:35:31

Ungoogled-chromium: it seems obvious to me that Arch needs to cut the google cord by supporting ungoogled-chrome by creating a direct install from pacman.

A quick look at the history of blink (if not google itself) is it's lineage (kind words) is in "the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE" (wikipedia). Culturally or politically speaking, this is ours and google stole it leveraging our ideas of 'free'. I was unaware of this (until just now), but my hairs stood up yesterday when I learned that I cannot make duckduckgo my default engine in chromium. Now, I would put this to typical capital greed, except that you could choose between the two other giants, bing and yahoo. And I could remove those two, but not add duckduckgo. I could access it, but not quickly, which is what the browser business has been all about since netscape vs explorer.

Point being, google is supporting greed as a dominant capital concept - even at its own expense. If something truly free and beneficial comes along (with me hoping duckduckgo is just that), google pulls for its direct competitors in opposition to competition from better, but smaller, efforts. This is illegal under anti-trust laws (I think), but not that democratic protection laws matter in these days of 'redneck insurrection'.

So given my disgust, I went and found ungoogled-chromium and attempted to compile it. Being a gigabyte of code, even my 80% current machine would have taken a good long time (using yay). I also have some questions about yay, because it seemed to lack some features of 'make'. I also attempted snap and flatpak (which gave me yay compiling experience). For reasons I cannot say, both these efforts failed. I did download something, I think from flatpak, but didn't have time to try to figure it out because the other compile was running.

Last edited by john beals (2021-03-07 13:48:46)

Awebb · 2021-03-07 14:15:26

If you post this here, all you get is chatter and rambling. If you really want this, make your case at the respective mailing list.

eschwartz · 2021-03-07 15:51:35

john beals wrote:

Ungoogled-chromium: it seems obvious to me that Arch needs to cut the google cord by supporting ungoogled-chrome by creating a direct install from pacman.

ungoogled-chromium still depends on google, despite the name. Use firefox.

john beals wrote:

A quick look at the history of blink (if not google itself) is it's lineage (kind words) is in "the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE" (wikipedia). Culturally or politically speaking, this is ours and google stole it leveraging our ideas of 'free'. I was unaware of this (until just now), but my hairs stood up yesterday when I learned that I cannot make duckduckgo my default engine in chromium. Now, I would put this to typical capital greed, except that you could choose between the two other giants, bing and yahoo. And I could remove those two, but not add duckduckgo. I could access it, but not quickly, which is what the browser business has been all about since netscape vs explorer.
Point being, google is supporting greed as a dominant capital concept - even at its own expense. If something truly free and beneficial comes along (with me hoping duckduckgo is just that), google pulls for its direct competitors in opposition to competition from better, but smaller, efforts. This is illegal under anti-trust laws (I think), but not that democratic protection laws matter in these days of 'redneck insurrection'.

This is the kind of reaction I'd expect from someone who gets all their news from trending threads on /r/outraged, with a side note of current politics (because ?????? honestly, what's wrong with people to make them think "google bad because ant-trust is dead as a result of redneck insurrection").

But just for basic context here, I don't use chromium, haven't for like a decade, hate chromium, etc.... but to test your assumption, I installed it, opened it, found a settings menu, and scrolled down until I found chrome://settings/search

I found Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia as built-in alternative search engines in a totally blank profile, and it took me 5 seconds to switch to DuckDuckGo.

Typing "chrome change default search engine" in the url bar opened up https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chrome+change … ine&ia=web with plenty of hits to guide you in repeating my results.

...

I have no idea why or how you get this ludicrous idea that forking from KHTML is "google stealing KHTML from us culturally or politically speaking", especially since Apple forked KHTML into Apple Webkit, 12 years before Google forked Apple Webkit into Google Blink.

john beals wrote:

So given my disgust, I went and found ungoogled-chromium and attempted to compile it. Being a gigabyte of code, even my 80% current machine would have taken a good long time (using yay). I also have some questions about yay, because it seemed to lack some features of 'make'. I also attempted snap and flatpak (which gave me yay compiling experience). For reasons I canchnot say, both these efforts failed. I did download something, I think from flatpak, but didn't have time to try to figure it out because the other compile was running.

Your vagueness tells no one anything.

Last edited by eschwartz (2021-03-07 15:53:30)

Morn · 2021-03-08 11:22:26

On a German Linux blog (https://gnulinux.ch/chromium-fliegt-raus) it was reported that Arch would remove Chromium from its repos once Google sync support is gone. Is that true?

If so, please reconsider. Not everyone wants or needs sync features in their browser! When Google features are removed from Chromium that is a good thing in my book.

progandy · 2021-03-08 11:36:15

Here is the discussion:
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/a … html#30260

And the news item: https://archlinux.org/news/chromium-los … rly-march/

For now it seems that Chromium will stay. Of course there is no sync support since march.

Awebb · 2021-03-08 12:07:35

Morn wrote:

On a German Linux blog (https://gnulinux.ch/chromium-fliegt-raus) it was reported that Arch would remove Chromium from its repos once Google sync support is gone. Is that true?

gnulinux.ch wrote:

Führende Distributionen wie Arch Linux, Fedora, Debian, Slackware & OpenSUSE haben erklärt, dass sie Chromium definitiv aus ihren offiziellen Repositories entfernen werden, wenn der Sync-Support von Google wegfällt.

EN by deepl wrote:

Leading distributions such as Arch Linux, Fedora, Debian, Slackware & OpenSUSE have stated that they will definitely remove Chromium from their official repositories if Google's Sync support is dropped.

If a news site posts something like this without sources, then the news site is rubbish. Whether this is just plain wrong by mistake or intentional FUD, my first contact with this blog was an insta-no.

eschwartz · 2021-03-08 12:37:39

Morn wrote:

If so, please reconsider. Not everyone wants or needs sync features in their browser! When Google features are removed from Chromium that is a good thing in my book.

Google did not stop supporting any of the privacy-violating features from Chromium. They only stopped supporting the one that is opt *in* and offers measurable user usefulness.

Don't kid yourself that "Google features are removed from Chromium" and therefore somehow it's a decent browser.

Morn · 2021-03-08 14:41:17

progandy wrote:

Here is the discussion:
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/a … html#30260
And the news item: https://archlinux.org/news/chromium-los … rly-march/
For now it seems that Chromium will stay. Of course there is no sync support since march.

That's good to hear!

eschwartz wrote:

Morn wrote:
If so, please reconsider. Not everyone wants or needs sync features in their browser! When Google features are removed from Chromium that is a good thing in my book.
Google did not stop supporting any of the privacy-violating features from Chromium. They only stopped supporting the one that is opt *in* and offers measurable user usefulness.
Don't kid yourself that "Google features are removed from Chromium" and therefore somehow it's a decent browser.

No, of course it's not. I just wanted to point out that not every Chromium user misses these kinds of Google features.

As for me, I like to use Chromium for everyday, not-logged-into-anything browsing, so I don't have to worry about XSS attacks or hacks abusing auto-fill browser bugs (because my passwords are stored in Firefox). So with this setup I always need two different browsers, but not Google Sync because there is nothing to sync in Chromium in the first place...

Xaekai · 2021-03-22 09:57:12

For anyone coming to this thread from a websearch, you can reenable sync trivially.

When baked-in keys are absent Chromium picks up on two environment variables to supply it's oauth2 creds for G's first-party APIs.
These variables are GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_SECRET.
The keys Chrome itself uses have been public for near a decade, introduced by commit df82847bd3501ace13fc1b7f08265c0cdcf63d87 on Nov 23, 2011. If Google changes these keys in the future, obtaining the new ones from a Chrome binary is not going to be especially difficult.

Edit the Chromium desktop file, restart the browser, and sign back in.

Awebb · 2021-03-22 11:46:31

Thanks, Xaekai, that's very useful.

ugjka · 2021-03-22 14:23:08

Won't Google remove the sync feature at the code level eventually not just disable the keys

Last edited by ugjka (2021-03-22 14:24:22)

Arch Linux

#1 2021-01-26 06:14:37

No more google sync in chromium

#2 2021-01-26 06:37:03

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#3 2021-01-26 08:24:20

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#4 2021-01-26 09:04:41

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#5 2021-01-27 13:11:21

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#6 2021-01-27 17:21:57

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#7 2021-01-27 17:54:26

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#8 2021-01-28 05:00:18

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#9 2021-01-28 06:09:43

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#10 2021-01-28 21:45:55

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#11 2021-01-29 06:45:07

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#12 2021-01-29 11:24:52

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#13 2021-01-29 14:15:54

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#14 2021-01-29 20:10:28

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#15 2021-03-07 13:35:31

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#16 2021-03-07 14:15:26

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#17 2021-03-07 15:51:35

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#18 2021-03-08 11:22:26

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#19 2021-03-08 11:36:15

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#20 2021-03-08 12:07:35

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#21 2021-03-08 12:37:39

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#22 2021-03-08 14:41:17

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#23 2021-03-22 09:57:12

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#24 2021-03-22 11:46:31

Re: No more google sync in chromium

#25 2021-03-22 14:23:08

Re: No more google sync in chromium

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