Tell HN: Chromium forks for legacy platforms are disappearing from GitHub
Chromium Legacy is an up-to-date fork of Chromium which supports back to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (from 2011). On Friday, the developer's Github account and all of his repositories suddenly disappeared. The links now return 404 errors.
https://github.com/blueboxd/
https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy
Today, the same thing happened to Supermium, an equivalent project for Windows which supports back to XP. To my knowledge, the developers of Chromium Legacy and Supermium are wholly unaffiliated.
https://github.com/win32ss/
https://github.com/win32ss/supermium
Does anyone happen to know what the heck is going on? It's a little scary and makes me not want to trust GitHub. I don't see anything relevant in GitHub's repository of DMCA notices[1], and I'm having trouble coming up with legal grounds on which such a takedown could happen.
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1: https://github.com/github/dmca
37 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 92.3 ms ] threadThis is bad.
Regular old Chrome does in fact include a Widevine DRM binary blob, but Chromium doesn't contain the source for it.
If Google really wanted to push something like browser attestation (like they potentially did with their Web Environment Integrity proposal), almost by definition that part couldn't be open sourced either and would not be part of Chromium.
[1] Chromium is licensed under various open source licenses that Google can't retroactively revoke. Even for code that they own the full copyright on, they can at most release future versions under a closed license; for GPL-ed dependencies, that wouldn't work at all (not sure if Chromium has any).
Additionally, if you are concerned about MF3, your best bet isn't some outdated Chromium fork – it's Firefox.
I kind of assumed as much, but unfortunately that also most likely means that it'll lose Manifest V2 support at some point (not that upstream Chrome will keep it).
That seems to be the concern of some people commenting here, and I wanted to highlight that the two are largely orthogonal as far as I can tell.
And doesn't Google have leverage over Mozilla by way of their funding?
You can add push URLs to your origin branch such that `git push` automatically mirrors your code on multiple remotes: `git remote set-url --add --push origin git://another/repo.git`. If you maintain an open source repository, I would encourage you to have mirrors across gitlab, codeberg, and/or a self hosted gitea instance.
> GitHub really isn’t the place to host anything possibly damaging to or annoying big tech.
Why would Google give a crap if a handful of people futzing around with ancient versions of Windows and macOS want to run up-to-date Chromium browsers?
If you wanted to be super conspiratorial, you could point to Supermium's statement[1] that they plan to retain Manifest V2 support. But that merely puts them in the same category as Brave and Firefox.
At the same time, I don't know how else to explain what is going on!
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1: https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/#:~:text=Manifest%20V2....
Then ask yourself what the benefit of all that – already impossible – endeavor would be, given that Firefox also exists and isn't deprecating Manifest V2.
Finally, ask yourself which actual paths Google could take to still eventually force MFv3 on most web users without resorting to any such drastic and publicly-visible measures.
See? You didn't really need the hat!
> what the benefit of all that endeavor would be
Breaking all adblockers for good, ensuring revenue. Firefox has almost no marketshare so it’s more or less irrelevant.
> which actual paths Google could take to still eventually force MFv3
Next steps are to break the web more and more for non-chromium browsers. Already many sites that don’t work well with FF/Safari. There will be reasonable reasons to do that (eg protect the kids) but the end result will be 1 browser dominance and ads tattooed into your eyeballs - mark my words!!1
What stops people from switching to Brave, or some light fork that's basically "Chromium + Manifest V2"?
Google would need something akin to Web Attestation. And yes they did try that—so if you're going to put your conspiracy hat on I'd direct your attention there.
Stagnation is the plan, not fullfrontal assault. Programmers tend to want people using their products more than they want anything else.
If it's already open source, GitHub can almost (depending on license) use it as they see fit anyway.
"Bluebox doesn't know why his Github account disappeared, but it was not intentional and he has contacted Github support!"
"the Supermium GitHub repository is currently unavailable. Efforts are being made to restore the repository"
If this is true, it could be because of using Google API Keys in the software.
I think it plausible that we are seeing the shadows cast by competitive maneuvering between two industry heavy-weights.
It's possible this is GitHub just enforcing their size limit