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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: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:33PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:33PM (#461279) Journal

    Vivaldi! Arrggh!

    I understand and appreciate that $PROPRIETARY_BROWSER may be someone's preferred solution, but as long as free software does the job for me, I am not likely to look beyond the free world. Fair enough?

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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by takyon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:38PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:38PM (#461282) Journal

    I look forward to your series of code audits!

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    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:54PM (#461298)

      I fail to see the point of your comment. To me, freedom is important in and of itself and it's a great injustice if software denies users their freedoms.

      Regarding audits, if the software respects my freedoms, I can audit the code myself (as you suggested), hire someone to audit the code, choose to trust someone who already audited the code, etc. And of course, you can modify the code and share the modifications, and the entire community can do so as well. With proprietary software, you are dependent upon a particular developer, and they could far more easily abuse their powers. Free software simply gives you far more options, and that's undeniable.

      Your comment is pretty much an example of the nirvana fallacy. No software can be 100% secure and free of backdoors even if it respects your freedoms, but freedom-respecting software is still far better than proprietary software, and that's good enough.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday February 01 2017, @02:06AM

      by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday February 01 2017, @02:06AM (#461519)

      It isn't just code audits, it is the forks. When a closed product goes bad or changes revenue models you are simply boned. See Windows 10. Or more on topic, Opera. Contrast to Firefox or Debian.