[conspire] Chromium vs. Google Chrome feature (and antifeature) comparison

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Nick Moffitt (nick at zork.net):

> Flash support was officially ended with the new year, so it's
> officially *abandonware* as well.  It's worth the proprietary Chrome
> browser dropping it like a hot coal as of *yesterday*.

Somewhere it's presumably documented whether or not Google, Inc.'s
Pepperflash plugin follows the Adobe Systems EOLing policy or not, but I
can't bring myself to care, because... y'know, Flash.

> This was an odd point to make on both sides.  Chromium can display
> PDFs just fine inline, as can Firefox.

Each has a relatively decent internal PDF viewer, yes -- but see
footnote.[1]  And I agree that having one is ergonomically useful.  I
could swear that there was a time in the relatively recent past when
Kyle's point of comparison was correct, that Google Chrome had a
proprietary PDF-viewer widget and Chromium had none.  It is definitely
the case _now_ that Chromium includes an inline open-source PDF-viewer.
Am guessing this means that the Chromium devs got around to writing one.
(I don't really follow what goes on with Google Chrome, as I decline to
use it.)

My point to Kyle is that the proprietary PDF viewer in Google Chrome is
or was not reasonably considered a value-add reason to prefer it over
Chromium because it's trivial to have a decent PDF viewer on any OS
platform, even if it needs to be an external "helper app".  E.g., the
MS-Windows people can use a nice little no-security-nightmare open
source PDF viewer named mupdf (name signifying "micro-PDF"), among others.

Basically, I was telling Kyle I wasn't buying his proprietary-mindset
feature-itis mindset, because I know how to do a la carte.


[1] I just checked, and the canonical Chromium codebase appears to _not_
include an inline PDF viewer, at least as of last November.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/12584/why-doesnt-chromium-have-chrome-pdf-viewer-plugin
However, downstream integrators can easily add one (possibly pdf.js, the
one used in Firefox), so possibly if your copy has one, that may be what
you're seeing.  I _think_ mine does, but I'd need to check.