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RHEL 6 No Longer Supported By Google Chrome
sfcrazy writes "Google has declared Red Hat's RHEL 6 obsolete, showing a notification which says, 'Google Chrome us no longer updating because your operating system is obsolete.' Red Hat evangelist Jan Wilderboer says: 'We release new stable versions of RHEL every 2-3 years. The API/ABI stability is what sets it apart from community distros. Customers need long term stability. Google knows (and uses) that itself internally. By cutting the support of enterprise distributions they simply tell me to move elsewhere. That's not a very encouraging thing.'"
What the heck are they thinking?
Also, RHEL versions are supported for a very long time. You can have systems running one version of RHEL, with security and bugfix updates for many years at a time. The whole point of the distro is stability; you don't have to worry about upgrading every six months.
What is Google thinking?
If it was the other way round the headline would even make sense...
By cutting the support of enterprise distributions they simply tell me to move elsewhere
So Google wants us to go back to Firefox? ;-)
SCNR
C - the footgun of programming languages
Like Epiphany!
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I crack myself up
come on
You don't need a web browser on something that won't even have X installed.
RHEL is for servers, you could use it on a workstation , but fedora is better suited to that task.
I think RHEL 6 will be supported until 2020.
WTF.
Grab the code and build your own browser, It's open source.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle
And they support that? RHEL6 is at least being updated and maintained!
Why does Linux not have its own web browser?
Oh wait, it does. Firefox.
Why would anybody use Chrome when there's Firefox?
Seriously though. Google has Chrome OS and Chrome the browser. Apple has OS-X and Safari. Microsoft has Windows... and what's that piece of shit called that's supposed to be Microsoft's web browser? Yeah, that thing. Why isn't there a Linux specific Browser? Oh yeah, because that would be unnecessary because there's Firefox. I seem to be going around in circles...
Chrome is a desktop tool. Who needs Chrome when there are so many other tools available - wget, elinks (with js-support), curl, etc.
A while back people with Google Chrome installed on SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 found it no longer worked. A new version of Chrome had been installed along with other updates (the Chrome package adds a repo) and it had dependencies on newer versions of libraries than are in the current version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.
Devs hate it when they have to support code and APIs they obsoleted years ago. This reminds me of the years-long refusal of Red Hat to move their Python installation past 1.5.6 (because they couldn't be bothered to move their stuff to 2.x) and how sick the Python devs were of answering "why can't I" questions that they solved versions ago. And how Red Hat pissed off the gcc devs by creating a phony "gcc 2.96" on orders from enterprise customers, forcing the gcc devs to release further revs as gcc 2.95.2, 2.95.3, etc. to avoid confusing folks.
So devs, go ahead and piss off Red Hat. It's not like they want your input anyway. If Red Hat wants to freeze code at two years ago, let them maintain it. All of it. That's what people pay them the big bucks for.
There's an obvious reason why Google's doing this. They target the most popular desktop distros and can't be maintaining releases for old distros without a lot of desktop users. Now, if there were a 'standard' Linux API (lumping all the various API's together as something Google could target and all distros could support), this wouldn't be an issue. The same Chrome release for Windows can be used on XP->Win8 (desktop mode). That's why 3rd party dev's target WIN32. That's also why 3rd parties won't (for the most part) target Win8 'metro' - which differs way more from WIN32 than RHEL does from, say, Ubuntu.
As other posts have pointed out, though, Red Hat - or anybody else, for that matter - is free to take the pure open source Chromium and port it to RHEL. That is, until Google decides to target some library that RHEL doesn't provide. Then it's not such a simple matter to Compile and release the latest Chromium source.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Given that the Flash plugin is faster and more stable from the EXTERNAL version than the INTERNAL version.
I was forced to disable the internal one because it was seriously so bad. Youtube videos were unbearable as well, this high-pitch screechy noise at random every 0.5-1 seconds. (could be an Adobe problem, but there is no problem with external or on Firefox either, so I blame them)
Or making logical decisions.
Killing huge projects without replacements or partial replacements using current projects.
Not integrating Orkut, Google+ and Google.. whatever the hell the name was of that Twitter-like thing. That could have gained much more traction if they had done so.
The twitter-like thing for just the main messaging component of the service, Google+ component for the communication-heavy parts and Orkut for all the back-heavy standard social networking stuff. (Google+ is still not as social networky as previous ones have been, it feels too cold. Even more so than Facebook, which I hate immensely after they removed personalization pages in favor of mindless drone pages, and then that horrible timeline crap!)
Or making decisions in general.
Killing projects that they "can't monetize" when they clearly can.
iGoogle has a HUGE sidebar on the left where ads could be. Gmail has an ad strip, do that as well, ad strips are incredibly simply little things and even very nice if styled right. Nope, better kill it instead. Thinking about things is too hard at Google. How STUPID can you be, Google?
Oh and Unity just broke on me again. Nope, Chrome problem, not mines or Unity.
Not to mention the horrible times I have had with Chrome corrupting itself through the years, not letting me install extensions, crashing on updates (STABLE BRANCH), flooding a folder between my home directory and its directory with MILLIONS of temporary files.
You know how annoyingly slow it is when Explorer is opening large folders? You don't know the half of it. You don't know the integer percentage of it. God DAMN. I had to delete the files in cmd after I figured out what the hell happened.
Google are a headless chicken today. It is a joke how bad that company is these days. What the actual fuck happened to Google?
Did they fire anyone of any worth and replace them with college kiddies or something?
I used to love Google. I even wanted to work for them. Now that I see what it turned in to, I am glad I never even bothered outside of talking to the tiny number of developers that aren't total asses who actually have the balls to even want to stick with it. (even after having huge changes to their work done)
Don't get me started on Chromium devs, biggest asses there is. Chromium Development is a metaphor for how terrible Google has become recently. Removing and breaking features all over the place without replacement when it caused no harm to leave it there. Apparently they were too autistic to not look at one single file in a list that had 0 dependencies and Just Worked.
I sit here wondering how long it will be before Google crashes. With the horrible decisions they have been making recently, likely not too long.
I cannot fathom the stupidity that this once great company has unleashed.
No Super Saiyins here. Just Super Stupids.
I find it a bit strange Google would drop support for RHEL 6, the OS is only a few years old at this point and RHEL 7 isn't even out yet. Despite the fact RHEL is mostly aimed at servers, they do have a desktop edition and some places do use RHEL on the desktop. This move means Google is dropping any people using a long-term desktop, probably in a business environment.
I tried to check if Chrome runs on XP, but I'm on a Linux box and the only download links Google will show me are for Linux distributions. They don't seem to allow over-riding the OS type on their download page. So my questions is: does Chrome still run on Windows XP? WinXP is something like nine years older than RHEL 6, but still supported by Microsoft. Is this lack of support from Google OS specific?
... CentOS 6.3. Google will support CentOS, right?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Vendors don't want to the cost of supporting your platform, so they drop you. To avoid any responsibility, they simply add an error message blaming the user: "Your platform is obsolete." (I guess it's my problem now!) Many users are uniformed or credulous enough to believe it.
Many 'cloud' vendors are going this way; they've simply ignored their commitment to support their users and make the users do the work of supporting vendors (via upgrades and installations). I suspect it's because many users are consumers, aren't aware the vendors have this obligation, and take the 'error' messages at face value.
Worse, I see it in business situations. For example, cloud vendors we pay say that the current Firefox ESR is obsolete, or that we need to deploy browser upgrades office-wide every 5 weeks -- it does nothing for our bottom line, we'd just be doing it to please them.
There needs to be some push-back. We have no reason to absorb these costs.
This seems dumb imho. I run a CentOS server, I like to install a desktop interface onto it because there are a few things i use the server for that do require a GUI. and its also nice to be able to just open a web browser quickly if i need to test my internet connection after making changes since the server and my switches and modem are all in the same room. First thing i always do is install chrome, i was so happy to see it available for CentOS.. But now its gone. I guess ill just switch back to Chromium.
Some RHEL 6 businesses might want to contract with Google for their products like the cloud, online word processing, etc. What in the world is google thinking? What does this mean for small business that contract with companies to migrate to RHEL 6.x?
The threat to Google is Microsoft not Red Hat. Microsoft tried to beat google at it's own game.
I don't think I've ever installed RHEL or CentOS with X Windows. Frankly it annoys me that there are no desktop distros that are maintained for longer than a year or two. Are we really expected to reinstall Linux on a workstation ever year? That scares me because it makes me think the people who are using Linux are just screwing around and not doing real work. Anyone doing real work doesn't have time to reinstall Linux every year.
Customers will move somewhere else because they have want Google Chrome
i think you have other issues to solve if you are installing software made by the worlds largest advertising and data mining company on your frickin redhat servers !
much as i like google products, i wouldnt install give them binary rights on anything, they are bad enough with Javascript and at least i have Mozilla/Opera acting as a buffer to what tricks they can exploit.
Not ones that force us to upgrade to um- experimental user interfaces every 2 years. So CentOS 6.3 is our currently recommended choice.
The Linux community brags about how there are so many options, which are in constant flux, then complain when someone is offering something for free and doesn't want to support something that is 2 years old and no longer works in a modern environment.
I haven't seen a feeling of entitlement so bad outside of the MPAA/RIAA.
What's the phrase.. "Don't like it, fork it", just don't whine like a 3 year old.
Whenever you work with a computer system and have gotten used to all its bugs and misconceptions, there comes along an update with old bugs and new bugs. Lately, most updates were only for stupid consumers, and have made work worse for creative people. And all this sluggishness and CPU-time burning for brain-dead graphics. All this absence of reason for all this "innovation" on the user interface. All these crazy maniacs can keep their "features" for themselves, I don't want them any more.
They haven't even fixed all the bugs in RHEL6, and they introduced many new ones in the later version. A stable, bug-free system from ten years ago is way better than this greenhorn-crap that is being sold to brain-dead consumers these days.
Just have a look at which platforms are supported for commercial software, almost always RHEL and Suse and nothing else. You can't expect the vendors to adapt to platforms that are changing continously.
One has to suspect that the intersection between "people who are so desperate for stability that they'll stay on a rarely-updated OS" and "people who want their web browser to upgrade itself silently whenever it wants" is pretty goddamn small.
Not that that'll keep /. from getting their collective panties in a bunch, but still...
This is very surprising coming from a company (Google) that supports open platforms and encourages open source software. I don't understand what a web browser like Chrome needs to rely on so heavily of a long-term released operating system. The binaries should be written to run on any version of GNU/Linux.
For god's sake, see Google for what it really is. The company was formed by the NSA to provide storage solutions for infinitely scalable intelligence databases. You all know how badly official government IT projects go- massive budget overruns, incredible delays, and after all that the hardware and software is junk. Google was the NEW model for effective government IT development.
Today, every major intelligence agency linked to the USA stores the data it collects on everything on 'shadow' Google systems- computers owned and run by the intelligence agency itself, but using Google's hardware and software system designs. The technology Google creates to better provide 'ad' services actually allows governments to mine their databases more efficiently.
Of course, the beauty of all this is that Google IS a commercial entity. That's the whole point. That's is what makes it infinitely more effective than any official government project. And Google is a megalomaniac that wants to 'rule' the world.
We are in a post-MS, post-Intel world. The age of the traditional PC is over (and god only knows, it had an incredible run). Google looks at the world of Linux and sees a bad joke. Why is Microsoft still able to charge a fortune for something that should be free- the operating system? Because the alternative, Linux, is in the hands of complete morons.
Now with Android and ChromeOS, Google has the power to put things right. No sane person wants to mess with an OS that STILL doesn't have proper support for most of the PC hardware that requires drivers. What the world needs is a free replacement for Windows XP, where the whizziness is built into applications that RUN on the OS, not the OS itself. Even today, people who think themselves skilled with computers confuse the 'Shell' with the 'OS'.
The underlying OS MUST be strong. For instance, the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony each have EIGHT proper CPU cores. The OS must handle memory and thread issues flawlessly for multiple apps running with multiple threads and multiple contexts on the GPU. Having a computer grind to a halt when two apps try to access the same HDD at the same time is no longer acceptable.
Linux has wins in the server space because of 'hard hacks' to the kernel, but a general OS needs to be versatile WITHOUT hacking the underlying mechanisms for the benefit of one application.
Google is working with the next PC revolution, low power computers with growing numbers of ARM CPU cores, and complete GPU acceleration for all visual output (something Windows only got with Vista). Goggle's Chromebooks have been a massive success. Google is on the edge of providing a desktop OS from Android, or a fusion of Android with ChromeOS. Why would Google give a damn about supporting prehistoric Linux distributions from the FAILED. Let Android replace ALL other non-specialised 'desktop' versions of Linux.
A stable, powerful platform from a company NOT called Apple or Microsoft, and for free. Based on the principles of Linux, but crafted for the multi-cpu hardware of today and tomorrow. What's not to love?
I have to ask the question "Why?" Not as in, "why are you taking away my free toy?" but "why support for the enterprise Linux environment and then withdraw it?"
If you look at companies that earn most of their revenue selling to the Fortune 500 and government, you will notice that nearly all of them (excluding OS vendors obviously) offer hardware/software support for the latest Enterprise Linux major release. It may not benefit their bottom line as much as Microsoft products, but it is a clear sign to prospective customers that they are serious about supporting the enterprise environment. Let's put this decision in context - we are talking about upstream products from a $1B/yr highly successful company and likely a much larger user base on CentOS and SL. It's not like they dropped support for some third-tier distribution that only a handful of people in the world care about.
Personal impact aside (I use 4 EL6 workstations on a daily basis, all of them loaded with Chrome for internal applications and web browsing), the message to the market is "we're not serious." I will keep that in mind the next time the Google guy shows up and wants to sell search appliances at my Fortune 500 company.
I can't use new Linux distros because ATI dropped support for cards below HD 5000 right at the time xorg revved from 1.12 to 1.13. Now the drivers are permanently busted for all ati cards that are HD models below 5000. That's a lot of people left in the dark. I'll never buy an ATI card again.
I'm sure Google's services runs just fine in Firefox.
What "proprietary components"?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
You can run RHEL/CentOS with current Chome, Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, the usual multimedia apps, etc., etc., These programs are not in the official RHEL/CentOS repositories but they are available in reliable independent repos. I know because I've done it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Google had indicated a Google-Drive client was being ported to mainstream Linux, but have not uttered a word for many months.
In the mean time, they have released a Google-Drive client for the chromebook, which indicates its not a technical challenge, rather a social disorder (ok... from my perspective!).
https://productforums.google.com/d/topic/drive/j_SmC6bMsEo/discussion
Sounds alot like Apple co-opting the MP3 audio format into a branded solution in static (ipod collections) and streamed (podcast) formats.
I really hope they are not trying to line their nest at the expense of the community that created Linux.
Speaking of which, is there a Chrome version for Debian
... was quoted criticizing Google by using a Google+ link, of all possibiliies of becoming slashdotted. Go figure.
Is it a spyware tracking trojan horse designed to act like a browser?
Google is scroogling again. Even redhat.
this post on g+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/100132233764003563318/posts/Y1s6T44Soby explain the problem: chrome/chromium won't compile with gtk+ 2.24.0. that's why rhel 6, ubuntu 10.04, debian 6.0 and each distro with outdated gtl all deprecated.
Firefox just releases a binary distribution (tar.gz) for Linux like they do for MacOS and Windows. It runs on AFAIK every, not really old, distribution. Something Chrome and other software vendors could do as well.
There is a problem with the traditional linux fixed-version distribution of software. You can either choose to use an unstable distro like Fedora OpenSUSE Ubuntu that break once in a while, or choose a stable distro like Debian Stable Ubuntu LTS RHEL/CentOS, and come to the problem that software that is mature to change like browser and desktop stuff being outdated. I think it's also a waste of time for the distribution organisation to maintain all those software packages, it's something the vendors of the particular software should do.
It's also annoying that with the customer distros, nice good working software will be thrown away, like Gnome2 and KDE3 where dropped immediatly after release of Gnome3 and KDE4 (which was really unstable and unusable in the early days).
I now choose to use EL6 (CentOS) now as a OS basis and install/compile new software on it by hand. I have build KDE 3.5.10 and KDE 4.9.5 succesfully for it, works fine. And it will keep working as is for the next couple of years because the API/ABI of the underlying libraries will be stable.
I just did a search in the Red Hat yum repositories for my RHEL 6.3 Server / Developer Workstation. Google chrome looks alive and healthy to me--at least on RHEL 6.3. Of course I regularly update and patch this server since it's my personal developer workstation. Personally I use google chrome on RHEL everyday to "google", read my google mail, read google books and play google music--all thru the chrome browser running in RHEL.
1 google-chrome-beta.x86_64 : Google Chrome
2 google-chrome-stable.x86_64 : Google Chrome
3 google-chrome-unstable.x86_64 : Google Chrome
4 google-musicmanager-beta.x86_64 : Google Music Manager
5 googlecl.noarch : Command line tools for the Google Data APIs
6 python-googlevoice.noarch : Python language bindings for the Google Voice API
7 trytond-google-maps.noarch : google-maps module for Tryton
8 trytond-google-translate.noarch : google-translate module for Tryton
9 erlang-snappy.x86_64 : An Erlang NIF wrapper for Google's snappy library
10 geome.noarch : Obtain your geo-location data from Google using NetworkManager
11 google-authenticator.i686 : One-time passcode support using open standards
12 google-authenticator.x86_64 : One-time passcode support using open standards
13 google-droid-sans-fonts.noarch : A humanist sans serif typeface
14 google-droid-sans-mono-fonts.noarch : A humanist monospace sans serif typeface
15 google-droid-serif-fonts.noarch : A contemporary serif typeface
16 gtest.i686 : Google C++ testing framework
17 gtest.x86_64 : Google C++ testing framework
18 leveldb.i686 : A fast and lightweight key/value database library by Google
19 leveldb.x86_64 : A fast and lightweight key/value database library by Google
20 protobuf.i686 : Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format
21 protobuf.x86_64 : Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format
22 protobuf-c.i686 : C bindings for Google's Protocol Buffers
23 protobuf-c.x86_64 : C bindings for Google's Protocol Buffers
24 protobuf-python.x86_64 : Python bindings for Google Protocol Buffers
25 protobuf-vim.x86_64 : Vim syntax highlighting for Google Protocol Buffers descriptions
26 python-gdata.noarch : A Python module for accessing online Google services
27 totpcgi.noarch : A centralized totp solution based on google-authenticator
28 totpcgi-provisioning.noarch : CGI for Google Authenticator provisioning using totpcgi
Every time I log into Gmail, I get the warning that my browser is obsolete and need to upgrade (or switch?). I'm running Debian stable, with the stable version of Firefox (Iceweasel, which correctly identifies as Firefox with Google/Gmail). iirc, I get the same warning with Mozilla's suite browser (Iceape), and possibly the stable version of Chromium (Chrome) as well. Can't recall what the response is with Konqueror because of the instability/crashing and faulty crash recovery that is Konqueror hell for the last ten years (and I'm currently crashed and unable to recover without crashing again instantly during recovery), so skip Konqueror but I suspect the response is the same.
Are you sure that's the Red Hat repositories, and not third party Google repositories?
As fas as I understood the current version will remain forever, but you won't get any updated.
.. quality. It is just a hacked and released when the dev claims it is ready .... doing nothing but basic automatic unit-test and rarely doing any integration or system testing.
Google engineers do not generally understand the reasons behind platform, API stability. This is just one more example. They think that enterprise IT should be run like their home hobby systems. This is why some nerd at Google decided that rather than do the work to make their product exhibit some longitudinal support, they would simply declare anything that they didn't want to deal with as being "obsolete". Seems like a good reason to stay away from Google products myself.
it will be fixed automatically with next automatic update ;-)