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Google Removes Plugin Controls From Chrome, Reports Claim (ghacks.net)
An anonymous reader shares a Ghacks report: Google made a change in Chrome 57 that removes options from the browser to manage plugins such as Google Widevine, Adobe Flash, or the Chrome PDF Viewer. If you load chrome://plugins in Chrome 56 or earlier, a list of installed plugins is displayed to you. You can use it, among other things, to disable plugins that you don't require. While you can do the same for some plugins, Flash and PDF Viewer, using Chrome's Settings, the same is not possible for the DRM plugin Widevine, and any other plugin Google may add to Chrome in the future. Starting with Chrome 57, that option is no longer available. This means essentially that Chrome users won't be able to disable -- some -- plugins anymore, or even list the plugins that are installed in the web browser. Please note that this affects Google Chrome and Chromium.Further report on BetaNews.
...Well, then it's hardly a plugin anymore, is it?
Is their goal to make IE look good?
DRM+flash+ads always on in chrome now?
Man, way to shoot themselves in the food.
Dear Firefox,
Please do NOT copy this feature.
Signed,
All four of us who still use Firefox.
I get on one hand it saves some headaches to the average end user who doesn't care what plugins are installed. But on the other hand...The only reason to hide plugins is because you're doing something you don't want us to see. A plugin whose code you don't want us to delve into and figure out what it actually is doing. Specifically Sending Private Data about History and censoring. We'll see how far this gets. Thanks Google.
Webkit is getting too popular. Many websites are using -webkit or blink specific CSS 3 tags and ignoring HTML 5 standards. THis is not healthy.
We need another new browser and not just one on an outdated insecure version of webkit/blink, but a new rendering engine with proper plugin and multiplatform support
http://saveie6.com/
When I can no longer see what's going on, much less have control of what 'Do no Evil' is doing - that's evil. Time to take my ball and find greener pastures.
By Google - it's been a nice ride. Maybe someday in the future.
I use Chrome only where complex web applications seem to need it to work (e.g. ones provided to me by my employer).
This move kind of justifies the challenges I face getting certain websites to work in my browser of choice (a Firefox fork). It may lack the level of website support that Chrome enjoys but it provides a shitload more support to me.
Sorry Google, your quest for world domination has already failed. Well, until someone kills me anyway.
Firefox somewhere back in the low- to mid-40 version nummers eliminated the option to ask the user for each new cookie that sites try to set. This was valuable to anal-retentive users like me who could allow the target site and maybe its CDN to set cookies, but BIGINVASIVEADS.COM and TRACKYOUREVERYMOVE.NET would get nada.
Remember when these were the upstart, alternative browsers out to help the little guy?
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Addendum: But if you're going to be evil do it gradually so that it's not so obvious.
Seems like a good reason to use Vivaldi and or Firefox even if it involves some hassle initially. Serious bummer seeing Alphabet do this.
No uBlock and Ghostery, no way. I run FF on both Linux and Android for this exact reason.
Norton Spywa...err..."anti-virus" does this. It installs itself into Chrome and Firefox, without permission, and doesn't allow you to remove it.
You can disable it, but not remove it.
[End Of Line]
ACHTUNG!! Ziz is ze Kookle Krome team! You vill uze ALL extensiuns, ALVAYS!
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
After Apple started with lock-in and iOS golden cages with no access to file systems, they started losing Karma with the nerd crowd. Karma they had gained so much in moving to basically a FOSS unix as their new OS of the second coming of Steve Jobs.
As Apples Karma burned, Google was the closest thing to the new darling child of the nerd/geek crew. With moves like this and them also slowly turning their phones into nothing but hardware outlets for their brave new google services they are going the way of Apple in annoying the opinion-leaders (us). This is never a good move in the long-term and usually marks a decline of some sort. You know, like planlessly releasing 2 additional messaging apps and other strange things. Chrome is an awesome browser and V8 does a lot to strengthen the web - the worlds #1 free plattform these days. But screw this up, and people will start finding ways to move away from Chrome and Google. I hope there are enough smart techies in charge at Google to backpedal on this decision.
All that aside I have a question:
Is there a Fork of Chromium in the wild that won't follow this lead? I use chromium regularly, but I've used alternatives too (Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.) and wouldn't mind using a fully FOSS Chrome clone alternative for a change. Any project doing this?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is presumably so you can't block ads via plugins.
Soon you'll have to use google's proxies, which will automatically insert appropriate and life-changing ads into any network stream you use.
I do use uBlock Origin in Chrome though...?
Google doesn't attempt to use a new directory if the directory it expects for the plugin exists but lacks appropriate permissions. Remove permissions for yourself and the plugin stops working.
This works for the flash installed in syswow64 and system32 as well. Just be careful editing permissions in those subtrees :)
now if and/or when this filters down to the chromium builds included with Linux distros that just remove people's ability to customize how their browser functions, i dont even want flash on my PC at all, not even as disabled code, i guess its time to find another browser
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Important distinction:
chrome://plugins/ is where the internal PDF viewer is enabled or disabled.
chrome://extensions/ is where you put uBlock, or your corporate overlords install WebSense.
Plugins are moving to chrome://settings/content
That's it. INTERNAL PLUGINS ARE GETTING MOVED to a new menu location.
Just how many apps could a luddite app, if a luddite could app apps?
The story while correct does not take in to account that there is another way to manage extensions. One could right click on an extension and select manage extensions from the drop down menu and the normal extension panel will display.
Chrome 56 enables Flash each time it starts, even if I manually disable it That is quite bad, because it leaves my system vulnerable to a flash exploit (there are tens of them) and malicious code which steals history, cookies, etc, while I am thinking that I have completely disabled it. That is a fucking dirty trick. I could get tracked or even compromised by crappy sites, not knowing flash is auto-enabled. Thank you, Google. You are definitely did the evil
Can a chrome revision be open-sourced, and kept "sane". Screw Google. They removed "do no evil..." from their rhetoric for a reason.
The problem is that chromium is ... fucking massive. It's larger than many OS, it's more than any individual can comprehend in his lifetime, forking it is no small task. I don't know enough about building a browser to know if it's possible - but I would really like it if smarter people than me got together and built a good fast browser with a small code base, that would allow a lot more in the way of forks and freedom. Chromium is basically chromium, and is unlikely to ever be anything more (with v8 as the exception).
We could ask the Iron developer to keep the plugins UI? Would be in keeping with their philosophy. (builds for other platforms are in their forums - including 64 bit).
I love it when one nerd decides all nerds are made in his image.
I fucking love Apple. Still.
Sounds like it's time to move to netsurf, which supports Linux, Mac, Windows, among a few others. It's open source, FWIW (but so is Chromium).
Is a plugin then similar "system component" as the Google's crapware applications are on Android? But what people expect to get from a worlds largest advertisement company? Do they really believe they can select on their devices what data is sent to services or what advertisements they see?
The problem is that we geeks don't have as big an influence as you think. This is proven by the fact that regular users don't care at all about the Apple walled garden and keep buying iPhones by the millions.
Abusing the users only has consequences if a large amount of those users get fed up with it (doesn't seem to be happening either with iOS, Android or Windows 10) and they can migrate to better alternatives. At this point, IMO, there's no good alternative in the mobile space, and in the desktop space your only real alternative is Linux.
I'd really like it to be a mobile OS that gave the user control. A regular Linux with a mobile optimized UI but without any of the limitations iOS, Android and Windows phone impose on users. Alas, at this point in the game it seems very unlikely.
A ver sad state of affairs indeed.
time to dump that shitty adware delivery system.
You're welcome.
Only boring people are ever bored.