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First thing I did was install Opera.. Since Google has been basically up FF rear from square one I figured Opera would be an easy choice to get out of the Googlopoly.. I went Opera before I even jumped to Linux.. also fwiw.. Ive been DDG for a while too.. cant blame them for tryin to make money.. even so.. its been a worthwhile learning experience and i am enjoying it..

We're talking about the same Opera that recently switched its rendering engine to Google Blink... even ahead of Google Chrome doing so?

Huh? Skipping mod points to say you are definitely wrong. The Chrome (chromium by it's open source name) source code is here and the android source code is here. nice try though.

What's the use of turning off an option in a browser made by a company that acts hand in glove with its domestic intelligence agency? How can anyone trust one checkbox in Chrome after this?

Build from source if you're paranoid: http://www.chromium.org/Home

We don't support IE 8 any longer, so those Windows XP users aren't supported anyway.

As I understand it, Firefox on Windows XP would have the same problem as Internet Explorer on Windows XP in that it's limited to the codecs that come with the operating system.

Many of those will have an AVC decoder on their system, but not all -- they can upgrade their OS

Even the latest version of GNU/Linux doesn't come with an AVC decoder because of the patent problem. If by "upgrade" you mean switching from GNU/Linux or old Windows to new Windows, you have just turned your site into a pay site if it wasn't before.

install Chrome Frame

I thought Chrome was dropping AVC support as well due to royalties.

or switch to another browser.

Or switch to a competitor's site.

Every time this topic comes up, someone like you mentions how you can disable every single "spying" thing... but fail to provide specific details about how/where to do so. Occasionally, they'll tell you to "google it" or "look it up yourself." I find that very curious.

http://www.chromium.org/Home

You're welcome

I feel like you don't actually know anything about the platform. You're merely commenting on the way they're marketed, which happens to be ineffective on you.

  * All Chromebooks have local (encrypted) disk.
  * Chromebooks ship with offline apps written by Google for their Apps stuff (GMail, Calendar, documents, spreadsheets).
      + http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2375012 explains how to set it up. You might have to click, *gasp*, twice.
      + GMail and Documents are writeable. Calendar and Spreadsheets are read-only.
  * The apps are written in the open HTML5 API. Anyone can write more offline apps, or games, or whatever. It's a fully-legitimate development environment.
  * If you want a full Linux, just install Crouton which gives you an Ubuntu chroot on both intel and arm chromebooks, under the auto-updated ChromeOS kernel and with disk encryption.
  * You can run Windows under VMWare, KVM, etc., on the samsung 550 and pixel, but it's somewhat painful on the 550 because you have to go through a challenging hack to turn on vmx. oops. (it involves soldering.)

AFAICT this is a well-supported Linux laptop, at last. If you don't like logging in through Google, that's a valid thing to complain about, but this "wah, wah, where are my apps" stuff is the same refrain we have every time someone offers a truly new operating system, "how do I run my old DOS programs on Windows," "how do I run my Windows personal organizer crapplet on my Mac," "Linux isn't ready for The Desktop because omg no apps." This short-term entitled-consumer view is like a default argument: "As a technology pundit, I'd like you to consider my well-informed view on the merits and faults of this new software platform, which is: I don't like it because it's not the incumbent."

What I don't understand, is where were all these whingeing douches when the "pads" came out? It wasn't, "it costs twice as much as a reasonable laptop, but more importantly doesn't run the $2000 of software I've already bought and on which my livelihood depends." Instead it was, "It's life-changing and almost perfect. We need to lobby $corporate_overlords to get the Creative Suite on this 1/5-power-CPU, 1/10th-power-GPU, under-ram'd, slow-SSD'd, external-storage-incompatible, overpriced Pad. Then it will be perfect! I can compensate for all the missing things with dongles and accessories! It's amazing!" You guys are really useless hypocrites.

so, get to work, and write some HTML5 apps: they'll run offline not only on ChromeOS but on other browsers, too. Compared to earlier apps, they're somewhat isolated from one another. Compared to earlier platforms, updates are faster and less quirky, security is much better, performance is similar on average but more graceful under memory pressure.

Or install Crouton. Or get a more expensive chromebook and run VM's. Or don't get one for yourself at all---get one for someone whose computer is always infected with spyware who is constantly nagging you for help. Or get one as an "extra" computer instead of these ridiculous "pads". Or don't get one at all.

But don't just watch an advert and then start blabbing about like some wise technical authority. I don't hang out with people because I want to pretend I'm part of a focus group all the time.

Firefox supports the blinking text, but Chrome doesn't...

Google's Blink seems to have an apt name. They named their codebase fork after things they actively don't support.

I'll just leave these here: Mozilla Bug 857820 Chrome Bug 13723005.

After all, it's a net loss to spend money developing a web browser when other fully open source browsers exist, so eventually I can see them dropping support for HTML when they don't plan to have to PAY any developers to work on it. Note: Chromium has developers that are not Google Employees. Some of us might have taken up the call to further maintain Math ML, if we were every fucking asked.

That's nice.

Its actually GNU/Linux because desktop and laptop systems mostly use GNU software with the Linux kernel. For simplicity sake, the family of operating systems is referred to as "Linux". Most distros refer to it the same way.

There is almost no GNU software in chromium os.

Linux is just a kernel. GNU is a collection of tools used on top of the linux kernel. Many desktop distributions include both Linux and GNU tools.
But the most popular linux distribution by far (android) does not have any GNU software at all.

You can combine them (or not) and call them _whatever you like_. As my post says, the authors of linux and GNU tools gave a written permission for you to do that. It is entirely up to you to call your own distribution "Linux" or "GNU/Linux" or whatever else you like, as long as the name you pick does not violate any trademark ( you can't call it windows :) ).

Have a look at the proposed architectural changes. It looks like they plan to make some rather sweeping changes, as well as moving the portability code to a different layer of the architecture. At some time, a project diverges enough that only a fork makes sense. It is nearly impossible to maintain a shared source base when making such fundamental architectural changes. It is a waste of time and the resulting mess only makes development increasingly difficult for both parties.

At least that is my understanding of the situation. My first reaction was also not positive, but I acknowledge that it might be necessary and desirable given the desired direction and constrains imposed by maintaining WebKit compatibility.

Did you even bother to see why they are moving iframes to their own process? Yeah, it's all about ads, not about making a more secure product... I think this has infinitely more to do with Chromebook than it does to ad sales, in fact moving iframes to their own process would give any ad-in-iframe LESS visibility into your surfing which you would think would be the exact opposite of what an "evil" Google would want.

I think defeating ad-blocking and enhanced ad management are one of the primary reasons for the fork.

The first thing Google lists for architectural changes is support for out-of-process iframes

Couldn't they even say "thank you"?

.

Full text:

I’m writing to say thank you, personally, and on behalf of the Chromium project.

Chromium could not have happened without WebKit and the help of its
contributors.

As you likely have seen, Adam just posted
http://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-chromium.html
announcing Blink, which is a departure from our previous WebKit
workflow.

I hope that others will see Blink as I do: as a chance to take the
WebKit codebase to exciting new places. I hope someday that many of
the ideas we pursue in Blink will find their way into many platforms,
including WebKit.

For those interested in the technical details, we’ll be posting more
of our thoughts and plans to blink-dev at chromium.org.

WebKit and Chromium have a long, shared history, and we hope to
continue our relationship. We will be available on #webkit and
webkit-dev and hope to continue our connections with this great
community for years to come.

Thank you again.

Eric

p.s. Adam and I are happy to work with other reviewers to remove
PLATFORM(CHROMIUM) code and other messes we may have caused over the
years from webkit.org. Adam and I are still running queues.webkit.org
and associated EWS/CQ/sherriff-bot and plan to do so for the next few
weeks as we work to transition them to new owners.

Funny that you didn't keep the title (I put back again) ...

Couldn't they even say "thank you"?

.

Full text:

I’m writing to say thank you, personally, and on behalf of the Chromium project.

Chromium could not have happened without WebKit and the help of its
contributors.

As you likely have seen, Adam just posted
http://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-chromium.html
announcing Blink, which is a departure from our previous WebKit
workflow.

I hope that others will see Blink as I do: as a chance to take the
WebKit codebase to exciting new places. I hope someday that many of
the ideas we pursue in Blink will find their way into many platforms,
including WebKit.

For those interested in the technical details, we’ll be posting more
of our thoughts and plans to blink-dev at chromium.org.

WebKit and Chromium have a long, shared history, and we hope to
continue our relationship. We will be available on #webkit and
webkit-dev and hope to continue our connections with this great
community for years to come.

Thank you again.

Eric

p.s. Adam and I are happy to work with other reviewers to remove
PLATFORM(CHROMIUM) code and other messes we may have caused over the
years from webkit.org. Adam and I are still running queues.webkit.org
and associated EWS/CQ/sherriff-bot and plan to do so for the next few
weeks as we work to transition them to new owners.

The only goal identified in their blog post announcing this was to be able to remove all the code supporting other people's work.

No, removing code not used by Chrome is a short-term benefit cited, not a goal. There are goals and motivations cited in the second paragraph regarding improved pace for implementing improvements. If you click through to the Blink project page, as anyone who wanted more than the orbital overview could be expected to, the details of the planned architectural changes (including discussion of what held those changes back while Chrome was tied to WebKit) are discussed.

If Google close it or do anything worth forking for, Opera will fork.

http://www.chromium.org/blink#participating

They are keeping legacy -webkit prefixes and are not adding any new prefixes. Please see here

Yeah I sure wish chrome was more open and "independent" (whatever that means).

A router only to wifi to the Chrome OS and no active prevention measures (human intervention).
If it's still standing securely after that time then I'll be impressed. Until then this is just great
advertisement for the Chrome OS and nothing more.

Researchers is a broad term and the conditions kept many away.

"To enter the Program, visit the Google desk at CanSecWest 2013 in Vancouver, Canada during
the Program Period. Entrants are entirely responsible for all costs and fees associated with
attending the CanSecWest 2013, including (but not limited to) admission fees, transportation,
accommodation and living costs." http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/pwnium-3

Why don't you go and read the original paper on NaCl? I know it's considered a novel concept on Slashdot, and somewhat faux pas (you are the 4th person to reply to my comment who apparently didn't do it), but still, try it. I promise I won't tell anyone.

As a side note, no perfect security was claimed here - only that security challenges specific running to native code are handled by NaCl sandbox, making it as safe as, say, JavaScript.

Will need doing and I'd say it can't be that much work. In fact it looks like they've actually done it. http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/64-bit-support

They're just not releasing it even though they claim it would take little to make it work on Windows.

I get the concept of a script locking up the JS engine, but my point is that you should always get the unresponsive script warning, with the option to stop it. If you don't, then it's a bug.

I don't know why you say there's no IPC. Chrome uses IPC heavily as documented here. I don't see any way around it, either.

Again, I don't know why you say you wouldn't need thread-safe functions either. Imagine if one thread reads the cookie database, and another writes to it. You bet that needs to be thread-safe... even if you're talking about the JS engine. I'm not a big JavaScript developer, but I know you're still going to need thread safety. Hell, everything would need to be, at the very least, re-entrant. Also, for what it's worth, the OS normally schedules threads with common threading libraries (like pthreads, but NOT GNU Pth which only has one OS thread and does its own scheduling).

First, they say "Chrome version 23 or above or Firefox version 17 or above are recommended." So, you can try either.

I had problems using Voxel.js in Firefox 18 on the Mac, so I downloaded Chromium (the open-source fork of Chrome) from FreeSMUG , and Voxel.js ran fine it it. It was actually snappier than Minecraft on my machine, but that may just be because of a smaller world?

I feel I'd probably rather download Chromium once and then surf to web pages than download a Java application like Minecraft and deal with all sorts of issues when trying to use Minecraft add-ons (given Minecraft has not prioritized supporting community add-ons). It has been a pain to manage lots of incompatible Minecraft add-ons (my wife even wrote a tool to help our kid deal with that). Also, when you download Minecraft addons, they presumably with full permissions and so could do anything to your system like read or delete files. I presume that web pages in Chromium are much more limited in what they can do (even though I have heard about theoretical WebGL exploits).
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/06/17/121236/microsoft-brands-webgl-a-harmful-technology

Here is a pre-built download link for Chromium if Mac users need it:
http://www.freesmug.org/chromium
Or people can build it from source:
http://www.chromium.org/

It would probably be fair to say WebGL is not that well supported everywhere. I had problems with it in Firefox as above. Still, it seems to me like this group is trying hard to use open standards with JavaScript and WebGL, so I'm not sure your criticism is fair in that sense. WebGL is supported by multiple browsers, but probably just not very well yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL

Still, give it time, and I expect WebGL (or something similar) will run most anywhere.

Anyway, this generation may be "nuts" in their own way, true. :-) The question is, is the "nuts" of a bunch of people across the planet getting together virtually to write free and open source software (for shareable virtual worlds of abundant virtual resources) more "nuts" than a bunch of people getting together to give us, say, the "Cold War" and the artificial scarcity of software patents and endless copyrights etc.?

I'm not a security expert, but isn't ASLR implemented in the dynamic linker? I would expect that the function lookup table you're talking about would be in a system level process, and not accessible in user space. My user level code would have all it's hard-coded function calls updated when loaded, and so long as my executable code is not readable, there's some protection of the actual addresses. However, if all you have to do is call a fixed location, asking for an address of whatever function is in that tale, then ASLR is pretty worthless.

I'm interested in sand-boxing some P2P apps in a way similar to what Chromium does. Basically, the app itself would be a DLL I'd load, and before calling anything in it, I'd drop all privileges to the lowest setting possible. Is it possible in Windows or Linux to disable the ability to dynamically load and link to a DLL or shared library? Preferably, I'd disable all system calls, other than reading from stdin, and writing to stdout.

Chrome was the first browser to do this, and has been blocking out-of-date and commonly exploited plugins (like Java) since 2010.

There is one final piece that the truly Paranoid tend to dislike about Chrome: RLZ. Here's the skinny: http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/in-open-for-rlz.html
Using Chromium vs Chrome also gets you out of that.

Disclaimer: I work on Chrome.

Make companies have buildbot's with waterfall charts that show the effect of every commit to the main source code repository. Just about every software manager will have this webpage open on one of their screens. The goal is to give every employee the "fear" of doing something wrong:

Waterfall chart

http://www.chromium.org/developers/testing/chromium-build-infrastructure/tour-of-the-chromium-buildbot

Make companies have buildbot's with waterfall charts that show the effect of every commit to the main source code repository. Just about every software manager will have this webpage open on one of their screens. The goal is to give every employee the "fear" of doing something wrong:

Waterfall chart

http://www.chromium.org/developers/testing/chromium-build-infrastructure/tour-of-the-chromium-buildbot

I don't use 32 bit desktops any longer. Actually haven't consistently used a 32 bit desktop in four years. To somehow not be aware of the behavior of real users is a huge fail.

You are aware that Internet Explorer and Opera are the only major browsers that have actually released 64-bit builds for Windows, right?

All Chrome offers is "Neither Chromium nor V8 has a 64-bit version on the Windows platform right now. However, Chrome does run on 64-bit Windows as a 32-bit application." At least Mozilla is making builds available, even if they aren't formally supported.

If I could get vanila linux on this, it's a fair price.

You can kick it into dev mode fairly easily, and it ships with fairly orthodox linux already on it('ChromeOS' has a deeply impoverished userland; but its kernel and such are much closer to normal desktop linux than Android is), so hardware compatibility will probably be OK-ish.

What I don't know, and haven't seen anybody mention one way or the other, is if you can(once you've entered dev mode) modify the UEFI to get rid of the scare-screen on boot.

I don't know this one, and I would like to know too, but on the ARM one, I remember reading that you could flash the firmware, but you had to open the computer and void the warranty. It could be the same for this one.

I have a big question mark about X11 drivers (see my post below http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3248917&cid=41968037 ).

If I could get vanila linux on this, it's a fair price.

You can kick it into dev mode fairly easily, and it ships with fairly orthodox linux already on it('ChromeOS' has a deeply impoverished userland; but its kernel and such are much closer to normal desktop linux than Android is), so hardware compatibility will probably be OK-ish.

What I don't know, and haven't seen anybody mention one way or the other, is if you can(once you've entered dev mode) modify the UEFI to get rid of the scare-screen on boot.

Cuz "Do Not Track" is a farce.

Oh I don't know about that, I have a feeling that DNT works fine, the problem is advertisers not respecting it more than anything as we all know. I have a feeling that the Chromium will implement something that makes DNT work...properly.

Funny enough, that whole privacy thing? People do. Enough so that various privacy commissioners do get involved like they do here in Canada and Germany, a few other places too. And in most cases they're not toothless either. Maybe that's just an American thing.

[Chromebooks] don't expose their contained data when lost or stolen.

Just to save anyone else the trouble of checking, the parent is right, and I'm a bit impressed with Google (just a bit, many OSes have options for data encryption now).
http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/security-overview

What about Chromium? Its Chrome without the Google stuff to extract data to track people for showing ads. http://www.chromium.org/Home I really liked Firefox and recommended to everyone, but with this loss of focus in an attempt to reprove its relevance with it so called "rapid release", its having the reverse effect and may give MS a new opportunity to push its semi-w3c complaint browser. Apple Safari may be a good alternative for MS windows clients but I haven't looked into whether it collects data. I need to see what plugins I can use with Chromium which is the biggest advantage Firefox has in flexibility over its competitors. Ironically, Firefox 17 seems like it will kill some plugins. Is the cure worse than the disease?

Eh, NaCl Looks pretty open source to me:

http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient

I have a healthy distrust of MS "open" creations, I'd rather use coffee or dart.

The robotic automated control systems are typically shit, but that doesn't mean it's not doable, it just means that mechanical and electrical engineers should not write robotic control systems, they should leave it to software engineers. In other words, it's the same problem that the Diamond Viper video cards had back in the day when they let EE's write the video BIOS, instead of hiring a software engineer to do it.

I recently spent some quality time programming a Toshiba CA10-M00 controller interfaced robot for the purposes of doing testing on capacitive touch devices, such as trackpads, and the programming interface at the lowest level was, to put it bluntly, incredibly badly designed. The one saving grace was "palletizing" mode, and all that let you do was do things like fill columns in a biological sample tray while moving the pallet on which it was situated over one row at a time, and then repeating the previous instruction.

In any case, the controller was pretty terrible, very limited in capability, and only capable of controlling 4 degrees of freedom without being ganged to another controller for the next 4 degrees of freedom; even then; you'd want to install optional interface modules to use for step-signalling between the controllers, rather than ganging them, based on the limited number of steps available under the control of a single controller, and the inability to do anything remotely useful in only 1000 steps (with 4 degrees of freedom, 1000 steps was pushing rationality as it was).

As delivered, the hardware didn't actually function (had to send it back once to have a servo replaced), and when driven from other than the EEPROM, the command language is insufficiently rich to perform motion on more than a single axis at a time (which basically meant writing a program to write a program, rather than controlling it directly). Additionally, the plat was oriented incorrectly, and there were no registration marks on any of the manual adjustments, and the robot was not set up to be capable of non-2-d self interference (read: if incorrectly programmed, it could beat itself to death).

To top all this joy off, they very much expected you to use a "teaching pendant" to do a single static program, and I had to reverse engineer how to talk to the thing with a documented list of serial functions, with no documentation of order or the requirements for baseline settings.

All in all, to get a suite of repeatable test motions that could be applied to multiple devices with different form-factors required some fairly clever hackery. What I ended up with was a library of code that could be used to write a program that could program the robot. The most interesting of those are not in the public repository, but the rest of the code is here: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/platform/touchbot.git;a=tree

The bottom line is that by using meta-programming, instead of using the default crap interface you get by applying teaching-pendant programming, it'd be pretty trivial to change over the location of a screw, or even radically alter the layout.

And just practically speaking, fetching a screw is a subroutine, putting in a screw is a subroutine, and where to put the screw in is a point in the X,Y,Z,R point table, if you wrote your code correctly in the first place, which you'd be unlikely to do if using the teaching pendant, but which was still technically possible using one. Which'd mean just rewriting the point table after issuing a region erase command to the robot controller over an RS232C link, after jamming the robot into a receptive mode with 5 other command would move the screw.

But doing the metaprogramming approach, it'd also be possible to radically alter the robot behaviour pretty trivially and be up and running on the real assembly line once you got your test line working correctly to the new model.

Which is to say, the argument that you can't as trivially recon

LOL. Click Menu -> Settings and then choose your favourite search from a dropbox.

Regardless of the users being able to override, you have to admit though that this kind of thing is the very definition of "anti-competitive".

You could also use the extensive GPO ADM templates that chrome has, if that sort of thing floats your boat.

You know you can disable that on Chrome, right? It's not even complicated. Here is a guide for the administrators.

I'm sure you can also disable it on Firefox as well.

There's no need to put them in the bin at all, at least not for that reason.

I usually start out flaming, and then it either gets worse or better depending on wether the other person flames back. So no need to thank me for being somewhat civil at last, thank you. I'm a cursed rabid dog, and I need to hear calm voices to turn into a coherent human, for a bit. But I digress.

I think it may be true that not many web "programmers" uses IE.... but saying that about programmers, yeah, that's silly, use what works for you. If you make websites, you'll come to hate (old) IE soon enough, nobody will have to convince you ;)

There is Chrome Frame, it basically allows you to use Chrome's rendering with IE -- only if the website contains a meta tag requesting it, but there is a way to make it default: http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-getting-started#TOC-Chrome-Frame-as-a-default-renderer

The idea basically is that you'd have more compatible rendering while keeping the user interface you're used to.

Strangely, I'm the philosophical opposite of RMS in a lot of ways; but oh crap... my friend showers fast, and I need to shower too...

You clearly ARE the staunch opposite of... the man who never saw a shower! *ba-dush* ^^

TFA is talking about in reverse proxies (of which Varnish is one of many), which are very commonplace. In fact, you're seeing this page through (at least) one, as Slashdot uses Varnish.

Publicly cached data is outside SPDY's use-case. It is aimed at reducing latency, and its main target is rich "web application" pages. Now it may well be possible to design a protocol that supports caching as well as reduced latency, but this is not what SPDY was designed to do.

The SPDY whitepaper suggest an keep alive timeout of 500ms while most sites do 5 to 20 seconds ?

No wonder why they think they are going to be so fast ;-)

Seriously although, I still see the point of this protocol but it might have been over-hyped a bit. Established things are hard to change without revolutionary gains to be expected.

http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

Single request per connection. Because HTTP can only fetch one resource at a time (HTTP pipelining helps, but still enforces only a FIFO queue), a server delay of 500 ms prevents reuse of the TCP channel for additional requests. Browsers work around this problem by using multiple connections. Since 2008, most browsers have finally moved from 2 connections per domain to 6.

That's old information. The version under development allows a portable representation.

Doesn't Chromium actually require building? I have no idea where to find a compiled exe.

It doesn't require building, but after nearly an hour of searching their website I still couldn't find a direct link to this: http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium

Which has a prebuilt version.

I'm not sure what to think. I've wanted Microsoft to lose its dominance ever since it eclipsed Netscape browser in 1999, but to replace one evil company that abuses it users, with another evil company that spies on people, is like a pyrrhic victory.

My logic is to celebrate the contenders even if it's just more of the same corporations. Am I the only web developer that noticed that Internet Exploder started getting passably decent as Firefox & Chrome were breathing down their necks? I welcome any sort of race when before it was just the aborted full frontal lobotomy that is IE6 as a candidate.

Besides, roll your own chromium and kiss any privacy raping proprietary ties goodbye if you want (and without the loss of HTML5 support and standards).

Some of, but not all of, Chrome is open-source. You really want that transparency in a web browser these days. Use Chromium instead.

Chromium is the project from which Google draws the source code for Chrome. You can get Chromium builds for various platforms, and they do not contain any Google tracking code (which is added to Chrome by Google).

AdBlock and NotScripts are both available, and I find them to work well.

I've been using Firefox for years, when it was still called Phoenix (actually, when it was called Netscape Navigator), but about two years ago I got finally fed up for a variety of reasons.

I installed Chromium and haven't looked back. It's lightweight and fast, the interface looks slick and stays out of the way, and the daily builds run stable on Macs and under Linux.

It was re-enabled 6 months ago:
        http://codereview.chromium.org/8393025

And it was changed back 6 months ago:
    http://codereview.chromium.org/8393025

It was removed just a few days after someone posted a complaint on the review of the commit that added it.

It was still there in October 2011 (search for "ru"), just moved around a bit. Next revision from that is the one that removed it. So it was there from May till October.

October is when the complaint was posted on the review, and a few days later it was removed.

It was removed just a few days after someone posted a complaint on the review of the commit that added it.

It was still there in October 2011 (search for "ru"), just moved around a bit. Next revision from that is the one that removed it. So it was there from May till October.

I'm impressed they went that far. It's still a far cry from Chrome's three big buttons, making it look like changing the search engine is some obscure customization that only the knowledgeable or the adventurous should try, but better than I expected.

You'd be surprised at how efficient several billion dollars in fines is at making companies behave better. No-one wants to be that next guy whom they can point at saying "he's the one that made the decision that cost us that".