[jandrese]

I'm sure the marketers made a big deal about it being "fully homegrown", but the engineers were like "that's a ton of duplicated effort, lets start with an open source browser and work from there."

It will be interesting to see if they keep merging in changes from the head of the open source browser or if they continue to diverge over time.

[subway]

If the way the Kernel is used in China acts as any indicator, it'll be a hard fork that gets discarded every few years for a new hard fork.

[jandrese]

Ouch, that's the worst of both worlds approach. Insecure and you get all of the work to re-port the code regularly.

[lawlessone]

>and you get all of the work to re-port the code regularly.

Secure job though, with predictable repeatable work.

[TomMarius]

Aren't you always guaranteed (and required to have) a job in China? That's how it was in Eastern Europe before the fall.

[faitswulff]

Not anymore. That was known as the "iron (rice) bowl," but that governmental job security has long since been removed from most positions.

[imron]

No. It hasn't been that way in China for maybe 30 years now.

[TomMarius]

Oh, okay. Which part? Both, or just the compulsory employment?

[fspeech]

I read that the fork is from an older version of Chrome so it could work with XP.

[wlesieutre]

Not just a ton of work, but inevitably full of security holes that existing browsers have spent decades fixing

[_0w8t]

Writing from scratch in Rust and using process per domain isolation from the very start can make things much more secure. But I doubt that is something that can be done under, say, 3 years.

[duxup]

How much his security their concern?

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

I'm sure the engineers are also being asked why they couldn't just do it from scratch, 'it can't be that hard', 'shouldn't take too long', 'should be possible' all by people who have not an ounce of knowledge about how any of this works.

[test1235]

chrome isn't open source, is it?

I'd be surprised if you found the red/yellow/green logo image in chromium

[kodablah]

It is open source. The icon after a quick search: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/third_party/skia/resour.... Unsure if it's the one that's, say, put in the Windows app manifest. Also unsure if the repo contains all the Chrome resources, but I was under the impression that it did.

[codetrotter]

Most parts of Chrome are open source under the name Chromium. Some DRM stuff in Chrome is not in Chromium and probably some other parts as well.

[gsnedders]

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/docs/c... documents the differences on Linux (given it's the only platform which regularly has both packaged). That does seem to miss the EME CDM, though (I'd write a patch for it, but I'm a bit busy at the moment!).

[akerro]

Google Chrome isn't. Chromium is, but Chromium also tends to download 3rd party close-source blobs from online resources, like the one that turns on your microphone.

[digitaLandscape]

If by "also tends" you mean "once, as a bug", then yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409

That's a disingenuous phrasing, though.

[vxNsr]

Based on the link you provided it looks like it's Opt-Out not Opt-In, so it's not really a bug so much as a "feature" that open source software shouldn't have but google wanted to sneak in. based on this link [0] it's pretty clear that they did this intentionally and only changed things after user outcry. I wouldn't call that a bug.

[0]https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435

[msla]

Sounds like the opt-out tracking Mozilla put in, or the advertisement for that TV show it spammed which did stupid things to text. It would be nice to have a mainstream browser which didn't try to track, advertise to, or shove "telemetry" into users.

[Dylan16807]

It wasn't an ad. It shut down before init if you hadn't manually set an about:config value telling it to run.

It was set up in a dumb way, but people also grossly misreported. The extension was "enabled" by default but did exactly nothing except shut itself down. The behavior was all disabled by default.

[DonHopkins]

To their credit, "Made in China" could mean the typed "make" in China.

[duxup]

I think until their browser really establishes some recognition ... you sort of have to follow in the wake of the primary browsers. Nobody wants to be the browser of "oh man why does it work this weird way" where "weird way" is "not like everyone else".