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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the next-they-will-kill-kenny dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Google made a change in Chrome 57 that removes options from the browser to manage plugins such as Google Widevine, Adobe Flash, or the Chrome PDF Viewer.

If you load chrome://plugins in Chrome 56 or earlier, a list of installed plugins is displayed to you. The list includes information about each plugin, including a name and description, location on the local system, version, and options to disable it or set it to "always run".

You can use it to disable plugins that you don't require. While you can do the same for some plugins, Flash and PDF Viewer, using Chrome's Settings, the same is not possible for the DRM plugin Widevine, and any other plugin Google may add to Chrome in the future.

Starting with Chrome 57, that option is no longer available. This means essentially that Chrome users won't be able to disable -- some -- plugins anymore, or even list the plugins that are installed in the web browser.

Please note that this affects Google Chrome and Chromium.

Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/29/google-removes-plugin-controls-from-chrome/


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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday January 31 2017, @03:33PM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday January 31 2017, @03:33PM (#461254)

    > (but still largely developed by Google)

    How precisely will they fork? Who will do the forking, and maintain the code base, implement new features?

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 31 2017, @03:53PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 31 2017, @03:53PM (#461261) Journal

    How precisely will they fork? Who will do the forking, and maintain the code base, implement new features?

    Well, it would probably be one of these four possibilities:

    1. People talking about forking but never doing it. (Examples of this happening are of course too numerous to name)

    2. A group of people forks the browser and removes the obvious evil bits, but then is unable to keep it up and it becomes abandoned. (Fewer examples, but still a lot.)

    3. A group of people forks the browser and removes the evilbits, and then tracks upstream for maintenance changes/new features. (Still fewer examples of this)

    4. A dedicated, talented, enthusiastic group forks the browser, removes the evil bits, and maintains and develops it as their own. (Examples of something like this happening: Pale Moon (firefox), to a lesser degree Linux Mint (Ubuntu)).

    The lower the number above, the greater chances of it happening.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @05:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @05:54PM (#461330)

      Firefox itself is a major example of possibility 4.

      The useless non-programmers pushed the programmers aside and ruined it by focusing on social issues, cosmetic changes, and licking corporate boots instead of making the software better. Seems to happen to all great FOSS projects eventually. Latest example is Debian, which has a fork with a strong probability of being another example of possibility 4.

      • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 31 2017, @07:14PM

        by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 31 2017, @07:14PM (#461375) Journal

        Latest example is Debian, which has a fork with a strong probability of being another example of possibility 4.

        Debian has a fork that is a solid 4: Ubuntu.

        Also a potential 2: I was actually tempted to mention Devuan as an example of a project being on the way to example #2, given that they have zero stable releases over quite a long period of time for development (since 2014, and they have not got jessie/8 going yet; it's at 1.0 Beta2. Meantime Debian is in freeze for stretch/9...)

        They do have interim and beta releases though, still showing some work, so not in category 2. Yet.

    • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Thursday February 02 2017, @03:12AM

      by toddestan (4982) on Thursday February 02 2017, @03:12AM (#461871)

      There's actually a few forks out there already. Comodo Dragon, SWIron, Epic Browser, are a few that are very obviously forks of Chromium that seem to be of the #3 variety. Since Chromium's license allows it, many of these forks are closed-source so you really don't know what's been changed in the code though.