chromium-browser in trusty

[Chad Miller]

Hi all.  I maintain the chromium packaging for Ubuntu, and I'd like to
explain its state and near future.

Chromium-browser in 14.04 is stuck in a bad position.  First, upstream is
killing* the old Netscape Plugin API as they rip out Gtk2 libraries and
move to their internal toolkit, "Aura". NPAPI is still popular among
poorly-updated plugins like Adobe's Flash*. Upstream hopes to have all of
Gtk2 (and therefore NPAPI) removed by next major release, which is a few
weeks away. Chromium source churns greatly, and maintaining distro patches
to keep Gtk2+NPAPI isn't maintainable.

So, some plugins are going to break. I picked the start of the Trusty's
release as the time to have a kind of regression, instead of one month in
as part of a security update. It sucks, but I think it's the better choice.

The new internal toolkit has a few bugs, which you may see. I'm fixing and
backporting fixes and I expect to see a week or two of ugliness, before it
stabilizes to a great browser again.  Please report bugs in launchpad
instead of here, too.

I hope this helps,

-Chad Miller



*
http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-friend-npapi.html
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromium-dev/xEbgvWE7wMk/D_07G2lftacJ


**  Adobe still refuses to update downloadable Flash for Linux, but
mulltiverse has a path to extract libraries out of Google Chrome and
install them, and the plugin-required popup now sends users to a wiki page
that guides users how to install.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Chromium/Getting-Flash
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