[sf-lug] Browsers (Re: (forw) Re: (forw) Re: Brave browser)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):

> Ungoogled-chromium is being kept more up to date, but the disclaimer is a
> bit disturbing.
> 
> https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/

Oh, absolutely worth heeding.

Technically, you don't actually need to trust some random person's
binaries, of course -- if you don't mind a long, disk-space-sucking 
compile and probably some iterative work getting the compile environment
right.  I've never compiled Chromium (compiling gcc and XFree86 were
excruciating enough, back in the 1990s), but I imagine you have to throw
a lot of disk, CPU, and RAM at the problem, and wait a long time to
grind through.

It should also be noted that ungoogled-chromium is for all practical
purposes maintained by one guy as a recurring patchset to the upstream
Chromium release code.  All other things being equal, something
maintained by just one guy is A Significant Problem.  E.g., back in the
first couple of years of RHEL unbranded rebuilds, several of the early
contenders such as White Box Linux died as projects completely when the
one guy who did pretty much all the work went off to do other things.

All of that mindshare ended up with CentOS, for which I can take a tiny
bit of credit:  It was just another semi-floundering RHEL rebuild
project, but I got my friend and former co-worker Michael Jennings,
formerly of VA Linux Systems Software Engineering, to join forces with
them.  Michael had been _single-handedly_ continuing to maintain the
entire RH-VALE distribution, VA's variant of Red Hat Linux (standing for
Red Hat with VA Linux Enhancements), for years after VA Linux dropped it
and exited the Linux-oriented hardware business.  A couple of years out,
he'd renamed RH-VALE to Vermillion to avoid trademark complications, and
had coded in Perl a comprehensive build harness for the entire distro,
such that he could do the whole thing himself.  Anyway, I insisted to
Michael and the CentOS people that they needed each other, and they took
my advice.