Why do we make it easy to pull random Chromium builds?

[Scott Hess]

Someone on the channel was just wondering if we wanted his stack
traces, which were basically just offsets because he grabbed his build
from:
http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium
note the convenient link to:
http://download-chromium.appspot.com/
which appears to give me a pretty recent build off the waterfall.

I can see why we might not want to make it super hard to get there,
but do we actually want to put that under "Easy Steps"? Or do we want
it under "Live on the edge where nobody will help you debug stuff"?

-scott

[Adam Barth]

We might want to update that page now that the Canary channel exists.  Go ahead and edit it.  If I were editing it, I'd like to Canary as the easy thing.  ;)

Adam

-scott

--
Chromium Developers mailing list: chromi...@chromium.org
View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe:
    http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-dev

[Aaron Boodman]

Keep in mind that no matter where we put it, we will have to deal with
people linking to it, and getting there from search:

https://www.google.com/search?q=chromium+builds
http://foliovision.com/2011/06/23/google-chromium-binaries
... etc ...

Making the page on chromium.org encourage the right thing is good, but
I think it would also be good to put a warning at the top of the
directory results containing the nightlies explaining the differences
between Chromium and Google Chrome, as well as a link to
the canary.

- a

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:05 PM, Scott Hess <sh...@google.com> wrote:

[Scott Hess]

I ain't a copywriter, and I found the editor ... refreshingly
eccentric. But I gave it a shot, if anyone wants to revert my
changes, go for it.

-scott

[Scott Hess]

Well, another option might be to have a Chromium build use a
post-crash infobar which said "If this were Chrome, your crash could
have been useful to the developers", and after 2 weeks have the NNNNTP
say "If this were Chrome, you'd have been updated to miss out on
seventeen recent security exploits."

I agree that would be annoying. But it's also pretty annoying to have
people confused about why we aren't interested in their text file of
stack-trace offsets.

-scott

[Torne (Richard Coles)]

Based on the sample of people I've seen in #chromium-support looking for downloads of Chromium, the two things I've seen often are:

1) Windows/Mac users who want it because they believe Google Chrome is spyware. If you tell them Chromium isn't intended for end users, some proportion of them decide the solution is to download Iron instead.

2) Linux users who are unwilling to install a browser that isn't open source, but can't get a current version of Chromium that's built by their distro vendor (the Ubuntu PPA maintainer appears to have gone away indefinitely, and most other distros are also very behind). They generally didn't realise that the distro versions of Chromium were built from stable branches and thus when they install a trunk build they may have problems.

I don't think either of these groups are particularly well-served by the ready availability of trunk builds, but it's not obvious what we can do instead; the links on chromium.org appear to be a relatively recent addition and people were installing trunk builds (and writing their own usually-insecure-and-wonky autoupdaters for them) a long time before that. :)

-scott