it's a bad thing. Most users are going to ditch chromium for chrome which is precisely why Google is doing it. A browser without cross device sync is not going to have a meaningful audience.
A browser and its bookmarks are my personal window to the world, I wouldn't enable a feature like sync for love or money. What a crazy idea: hey ad company, here is everything I bookmarked that I wouldn't dare even mention to my closest confidants
Firefox Sync encrypts all data client-side; Mozilla has no way to read it. Chrome also supports client-side encryption as an optional feature using an additional passphrase.
FWIW, although this isn't on by default, Chrome can be configured to encrypt all sync data, either with your Google password (which Google hopefully doesn't store) or a separate, offline, password.
You're making an assumption that doesn't make sense. If someone is using Chromium directly on Fedora, chances are they know WHY they're using it and this won't have any affect on them other than switching to another browser or continue using Chromium without the sync features as they probably never used them to begin with.
Isn't Chromium exactly Chrome minus Google extras? I was under the impression that the difference between the two was exactly said Google-specific features that were apparently only cut off now.
Its chrome without the closed source bits. The syncing part was open source I guess but required an API key. I wonder if they could in theory just grab the key from chrome.
Well depends on your definition of open source. Most of the code for the sync, as well as these other internal APIs, is on Google's backend and is very much closed source. The thin client code calling these APIs may have been in Chromium, but as a general rule of thumb, I wouldn't really call Google Translate and Sync open source.
Google provides the code for Chromium, but I'm not sure why there's an expectation that they should also freely provide internal APIs which require backend servers. What other open source software provides such guarantees?
> I wonder if they could in theory just grab the key from chrome
I saw some discussion of that in the discussion group. I believe it would break their terms and services for distros to do it, not sure if an individual could on their own though.
I mean if everyone who used Chromium switched back to Chrome when they can’t sync to their google account anymore, why use Chromium at all? People who care enough to use the open source version deliberately probably won’t be sad to see this feature go. I know I never personally wanted to log into sync.
but make certain choices easier, much easier. just use chrome, it's just less of a hassle.
I dubbed this "convenience herding". nobody is forcing you to do anything; they are just making some things very very inconvenient relative to how easy it's to just put it all in their servers or use their software (the cloud is an euphemism for not your computer)
Yes, but they have been simultaneously making it very hard not to use their sign-in your browser and sync everything.
If they actually revert chromium to not having any of this, they have the problem that they are building a path that works for a lot of people and takes us further away from chrome. It will be politically bad if they dead end that path, but a politically bad end is not unlikely.
