Chromium (and Chromium-based browsers) losing sync support on March 15

General system Applications
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PSA: According to official announcement from Google starting from March 15 2021 sync feature will not be available anymore for chromium-based browsers other than Google Chrome (like Brave, Vivaldi, Edge etc). Chromium package from Arch repo (and every other Chromium) will loose it too.

Info:
https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-availability-in.html
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2021-January/030260.html

Edit. Of course only sync with Google specific services will be affected.

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Moderation note: Moved from Which privacy browser?

Google is also now in the process of cutting off ALL other Chromium based browsers from piggybacking on it’s infrastructure using the Chrome sync service. Starting in March 2021 plans to limit APIs (features) that it includes in chromium making them unavailable on top of the open source codebase of Chromium. This discovery was made recently via an internal audit.

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Interesting, where did you read this at?

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Just came up on my Google phone. :rofl:

Edit: BTW I use Firefox! :fox_face: But not on my phone!

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:woozy_face:

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Looks like they are blocking them from using Google services.

From my perspective, that seems like a good thing.

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I wonder where those non-Chrome, but Chromium based users who were using those sync features would jump, when that happens :thinking:

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It’s understandable, looking at it from G :eyes:gle’s horizon.

The recent abuse discovered by Google stems from incidents where “some third-party Chromium based browsers” added API keys to these Chrome specific features and integrated them inside their offshoot browser products.

This resulted in these companies abusing Google servers to store their own data, effectively cutting development costs on Google’s back.

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I’m not sure how Firefox syncing works as i don’t use it. I know that they have Google search and get revenue because of it. But not sure if they have their own sync services?

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Just to clarify, this doesn’t mean that sync will stop working in all chromium based browsers such as edge/vivaldi/brave/etc as some of those use their own sync infrastructure.

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I’m not sure yet this is losing all Sync support (i.e. between browser instances), but rather losing “Chrome sync” (e.g. automatic login to Google products and any other “things” specific to Chrome).

I seem to remember (wayyyy back) Chrome and Chromium having the same sync service, then they split. If there are Chromium-based browsers out there using Chrome-only APIs then it’s understandable that Google would limit access.

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I think this is not a big loss for the majority of Linux users still, I am wondering about one thing:

I understand the decision for Chromium-based browsers like Vivaldi and Brave, each of them went another direction using Gecko. Why cut off Chromium also, isn’t Chromium the “development brother” of Chrome?

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I guess they don’t want their own open-source product to compete with Chrome.

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Google: you shouldn’t be evil… :wink: :rofl:

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install firefox in your phone and it sync’s between those :slight_smile:

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I installed Chromium last night on a new EOS Xfce installation and no problems with synchronisation.
:+1:

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If they could just remove ALL Google support, that would be great. Then I could just install chromium instead of ungoogled-chromium.

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This doesn’t go into effect until March 15th. That is when you may see a change.

+1

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My mistake, I didn’t read the date.

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Google degoogle-ing Chromium? Nice

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