Proposal for adding Chrome to software available in GNOME Software

[Christian Schaller]

Hi,
So as a first formal step since we instituted the new 3rd party software policy 
I am proposing Chrome. We been communicating with Google for a little bit and things
are looking good in terms of getting the things we need included in the Chrome repository. 
Once we have gotten this appstream patch merged (https://codereview.chromium.org/2424093003)
we should have all the pieces needed to include Chrome as a third party application in 
GNOME Software. So I want to propose that we add discussing this to the next workstation
meeting agenda.

Christian

[Kalev Lember]

On 10/18/2016 03:22 PM, Christian Schaller wrote:
> Hi,
> So as a first formal step since we instituted the new 3rd party software policy 
> I am proposing Chrome. We been communicating with Google for a little bit and things
> are looking good in terms of getting the things we need included in the Chrome repository. 
> Once we have gotten this appstream patch merged (https://codereview.chromium.org/2424093003)
> we should have all the pieces needed to include Chrome as a third party application in 
> GNOME Software. So I want to propose that we add discussing this to the next workstation
> meeting agenda.

Awesome this has gotten so far! Great work Christian and tpopela and
hughsie and everybody else involved in this!

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 03:42:34PM +0200, Kalev Lember wrote:
> On 10/18/2016 03:22 PM, Christian Schaller wrote:
> > Hi,
> > So as a first formal step since we instituted the new 3rd party software policy 
> > I am proposing Chrome. We been communicating with Google for a little bit and things
> > are looking good in terms of getting the things we need included in the Chrome repository. 
> > Once we have gotten this appstream patch merged (https://codereview.chromium.org/2424093003)
> > we should have all the pieces needed to include Chrome as a third party application in 
> > GNOME Software. So I want to propose that we add discussing this to the next workstation
> > meeting agenda.
>
> Awesome this has gotten so far! Great work Christian and tpopela and
> hughsie and everybody else involved in this!

Agreed.  We know from other fairly random sampling that about half of
Fedora users install Chrome for a web browser.  Making it a bit easier
for them to get it sounds like a benefit to me.  I'll make sure this
is on our next agenda.  I suppose the point is just to make sure that
we have all actions taken care of to include.  Would this be an update
later to the fedora-workstation-repos package?

[Richard Hughes]

On 18 October 2016 at 17:08, Paul W. Frields  wrote:
> Agreed.  We know from other fairly random sampling that about half of
> Fedora users install Chrome for a web browser.

If you want some concrete numbers, google-chrome.desktop is the most
popular app people are installing with gnome software. It's got nearly
twice the user review requests of the next application, which is
transmission-gtk and then closely followed by gnome-tweak-tool.

Richard.

[Jens-Ulrik Petersen]

Now that we have chromium in Fedora, what is the main advantage of Chrome?
Codecs and other binary bits?

If chromium is good enough for most Fedora users maybe we should be
encouraging trying that first? Hope I am not going over trodden ground.

Jens

[Christian Schaller]

Well what we keep hearing is that people end up wanting Chrome for Flash support
and for Google Hangouts support. So since we ship Firefox by default the exact
reasons why they tend to want to use Chrome instead of Firefox are the same reasons
why Chromium isn't an alternative.

Christian

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jens-Ulrik Petersen" 
> To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" 
> Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 10:39:29 AM
> Subject: Re: Proposal for adding Chrome to software available in GNOME Software
>
> Now that we have chromium in Fedora, what is the main advantage of Chrome?
> Codecs and other binary bits?
>
> If chromium is good enough for most Fedora users maybe we should be
> encouraging trying that first? Hope I am not going over trodden ground.
>
> Jens
>
> desktop mailing list -- [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe send an email to [e-mail]

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 10:48 -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
> Well what we keep hearing is that people end up wanting Chrome for
> Flash support
> and for Google Hangouts support.

Chrome is killing Flash in the very short-term future, so this is not a
good reason to pursue Chrome.
> So since we ship Firefox by default the exact
> reasons why they tend to want to use Chrome instead of Firefox are
> the same reasons
> why Chromium isn't an alternative.

Chromium supports Hangouts just fine. You need to build with
enable_hangouts_services=1. I'm not sure if it pulls in any proprietary
bits or not, though.

Michael

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 10:11:21AM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> Chromium supports Hangouts just fine. You need to build with
> enable_hangouts_services=1. I'm not sure if it pulls in any proprietary
> bits or not, though.

I'll repeat what I've said before: we *should* encourage users to
select open source software. Spreading that message is Fedora's mission.
I'm not opposed to having Chrome available to users from outside of
Fedora, but if the open source version will actually work for 90% of
Chrome users and they just don't know it, we should figure out how to
tell them (and, sure, to help people understand what that missing 10%
is, so they can make an informed choice).

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 9:11 AM, Michael Catanzaro  wrote:
> On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 10:48 -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
> > Well what we keep hearing is that people end up wanting Chrome for
> > Flash support
> > and for Google Hangouts support.
>
> Chrome is killing Flash in the very short-term future, so this is not a
> good reason to pursue Chrome.

They killed it last month for non-user visible content, like page
analytics, and this December they use HTML5 by default. It will still
be there as a fallback for sites that only use Flash, and for those
you'll have to opt in to use Flash. So it's a slow death. A large
number of big sites are still using it, and will continue to use it.

And then there's this, which suggests a slow death indeed.
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2016/08/beta-news-flash-player-npapi-for-...

Also, there's such a thing as DRM video content that does not depend
on Flash, that uses CDM.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm

I tested this on several sites that support it. But on Fedora 24 and
25, the plugin being downloaded by clicking on the Enable DRM button
when prompted by FireFox is thwarted by this SELinux bug.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1380253

I just installed Chromium from Gnome Software on an up to date default
clean installation of Fedora 24, and tried to view that same content.
There's no request to enable DRM, but it also won't play the content.
The video cutout says only "Requested Format Not Available None of the
requested formats are available for this content." There's no SELinux
alert, no other error message, or other work around presented.

On ABC, CBS, and BBC News, they all explicitly wanted Flash to play
back the content.

CNN is a standout where some of their video plays out of the box, but
a good chunk of it wants the h264 plugin enabled, which requires a
couple extra steps.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenH264

I'd pretty much bet dollars to donuts any content that was using Flash
for DRM reasons, will use the DRM plugins that currently aren't
working on Fedora 24 or 25 in Firefox; and aren't even requested (?)
by Chromium. That same content always plays without problem on Chrome.

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 10:00 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> Also, there's such a thing as DRM video content that does not depend
> on Flash, that uses CDM.
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm

That's not right, PlayReady and Widevine already exist and do not
require Flash. Chromium already has support for Widevine, there's just
a build flag (enable_widevine=1) that we probably don't use. (Of
course, it's proprietary software, so enabling it does no good unless
the user installs it somehow. :)

Michael

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 10:47 AM, Michael Catanzaro
 wrote:
> On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 10:00 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> > Also, there's such a thing as DRM video content that does not depend
> > on Flash, that uses CDM.
> > https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm
>
> That's not right, PlayReady and Widevine already exist and do not
> require Flash. Chromium already has support for Widevine, there's just
> a build flag (enable_widevine=1) that we probably don't use. (Of
> course, it's proprietary software, so enabling it does no good unless
> the user installs it somehow. :)

I'm not sure what you referring to with "that's not right".

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 11:24 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> I'm not sure what you referring to with "that's not right".

Oh, I totally misread your statement, that's all. Sorry. :)

[Nikos Roussos]

> Chromium supports Hangouts just fine. You need to build with
> enable_hangouts_services=1. I'm not sure if it pulls in any proprietary
> bits or not, though.

I just tried Hangouts with Chromium from our repos and it works without a plugin.