No, in fact one of the bug comments refutes this sarcasm:

> The default driver on the distribution we support is broken.

They do test the default driver on the distributions they support. The tests show that the driver is unacceptably unstable. It may work better on other distros/versions, but they don't have time to test those. They're happy for others to help out in testing these unsupported combinations, however:

> Again, if someone wants to spend the time to test thoroughly to narrow down the blacklist, we will accept patches.

Not for a free product, no. It's not our place to decide for Google what they want to do. If we want our open source software to work we should make it work. You can rebuild chromium to change the blacklist, or just use the command line to tell it to ignore the blacklist. It's not like Google doesn't provide options.

And in any case the reason nouveau sucks (and yes, folks, nouveau sucks) isn't Google's fault to begin with.

You seriously want to complain about Google's lack of support for an open source driver that barely exists because of NVIDIA's lack of support?

It's free in the sense you don't pay for it with money, but considering how much Google pays apple to use Google as the default search engine, I would say the Google Browser is a big money maker.

No, Chromium is free in the GNU sense, which is what I meant. You don't whine at open source providers to support features you want, it's bad form. Go fix it yourself, or use hardware that doesn't require this kind of hacky reverse engineering.

It's fairly uncommon for open source software to blacklist components that (attempt to) implement a compatible interface. Usually selecting an appropriate hardware driver is left in the hands of the distribution or administrator.

Yes, and the distributor or administrator is free to rebuild the browser or just set the flag to disable blacklisting. It’s only default behavior that changed.

Chrome has the special sauce — distributors and administrators cannot rebuild it, only Chromium.

Flip the flag then.

It's crazy to suggest they should give web access (not just webgl, but CSS styling) to a buggy GPU driver by default without an opt in by the user.

Is that different than the branding/trademark issue that Firefox also had for years?

(Not bring cynical, I genuinely don't know.)

Yes, it's different. You can build trademark Firefox so long as you do not modify it at all. You cannot build Chrome from the chromium sources — there are components which are not present in the open source repository. It's not just the trademark, unlike Firefox vs Iceweasel.

Thanks for the explanation!

From reading more about it, it seems these are all benign (in the sense of Chromium couldn't ship h264 because it's licensed but Chrome can).

> You don't whine at open source providers to support features you want, it's bad form. Go fix it yourself

This just about sums up the problem with open source. The response is always "if you don't like it, fix it yourself". Because everybody is a developer with copious free time to learn how to fix the problem in their favorite product. It's not like cloning and building Chromium takes hours. Or like you would lose anything by using Chromium instead of Chrome.

> Because everybody is a developer with copious free time to learn how to fix the problem in their favorite product.

But that's the point. The response always works because it's proportional to the problem. For problems that are legitimately small and you could fix yourself, or pay someone to do it for an amount of money that a normal person could feasibly pay, it's a valid way to solve the problem.

And for problems bigger than that, it invites the user to consider what they're really asking for and who they're asking for it. Actually fixing nVidia's dumpster fire would be a huge ordeal for anyone other than nVidia. Asking a third party to do it without documentation... let's just say there is a reason nouveau is in the state that it's in, and it's not a general lack of interest in fixing it.

So in that case "go fix it yourself" means "if you think it's so easy then let's see you do it."

I don't see what the issue here is. If you don't have the time to do it then get someone else to do it. If they won't do it for free then you pay them. The unfortunate part is that if you regularly buy brand new Nvidia cards then the cost of the proprietary driver is built into the price of the card, so it sucks that you would have to pay twice for drivers. But this clearly is a result of Nvidia's decision, they are thes one who are forcing you to take personal responsibility for getting your own libre drivers working, not the developers working on said libre (and gratis) drivers.

Sorry for the confusion, I see mentioning Chromium by name made my comment a bit misleading. I was responding to the parent comment (not to the original post) and using Chromium as an example of how it's unrealistic to ask users to fix things themselves when using OSS. I was not trying to comment on Google's decision on this particular issue here (though I have mild thoughts on that too).

The proprietary version is "if you don't like it, learn to like it."

Which is the same as the open source version?

No, with open source you have the choice to do or pay someone for the work. With closed source you get what the devs give you.

That’s still Hobson’s choice.

> Because everybody is a developer with copious free time to learn how to fix the problem in their favorite product

It takes copious free time to learn how to run chromium with an --ignore-gpu-blacklist argument? What kind of strawman are you trying here?

Look. The open source NVIDIA driver is terrible, and Google doesn't want it messing up the experience of the people using its product. Who are you to demand that Google fix someone else's terrible driver (which is terrible through no fault of Google's -- NVIDIA would prefer it not exist at all)?

If you really cared about this at all, you'd be upset with NVIDIA. But you're not. You apparently don't even like open source software, which presumably means you're using the binary drivers and unaffected, right?

I'm not complaining about the decision, I'm just saying the rationale given is ridiculous.

The driver is hopeless? Fine.

You don't want to spend money on people that will most probably install an ad blocker? Go ahead.

You don't have the resources? Come on.

I mean, just because it's one of two GPU producers, that doesn't mean the nvidia product line is simple. There are desktop chips, there are notebook chips, there are multiple versions of the same card made by different manufacturers who add their own little touches, there are different chipsets, there are different configurations, there are different X11 setups, there are different desktop environments which may enforce different settings, etc.

It's not as simple as "one of the two most widespread GPU producers in the market".

and it's not one of two, it's one of three. Intel has huge market share, also, especially in things like notebooks.

Obviously it’s not that Google doesn’t have the resources. They have enough resources to fund whole new OSes. Of course they could fund testing.

Chrome team, on the other hand, does not have the resources. Which is to say that this is not the thing they believe is most important to work on at the margin, and given the amount of engineers Google will fund for the project.

Which, to be clear, seems entirely justifiable because software rendering exists.

If Nvidia wants their cards to work well on an all-free-software stack, they can provide a free software driver. If users care about making an unofficial driver work, they can do the work or fund the work. Chrome is just trying to get web pages on the screen and it doesn't seem like it's worth the boil-the-ocean level of effort of taking responsibility for implementing a reverse-engineered graphics driver when they can just get web pages on the screen using software rendering.

As far as I understood they could get pages on the screen even with the nouveau driver.

That's the part that I don't understand. The bug report says on Linux the same rendering is used for the UI as well as the page content... but only the UI was ever having a problem?

Something doesn't add up to me there, and no one that I saw ever addressed that in more detail.

If the chrome team doesn't have the resources for testing the most common Linux configurations, it's not a good sign. Linux market share is low but it's a useful signifier.

They have the resources to test that configuration. They just don’t have the resources to fix the driver bugs the tests found.

you're the only one saying the don't. they are saying the most common linux configuration causes issues so blacklist the buggy driver in it

they are also saying their that driver may work fine on some less common linux configurations, and the chrome team does not have the resources to test those.

you are literally saying they are saying the opposite of what they said, then blaming them for it.

They were using "not enough resources" to support the idea of blacklisting. If they meant it as you say, that means they're blanketly blacklisting the most common config despite having the resources to test it, which is even worse.

I'm not sure what is unclear to you here. They do support the idea of blacklisting for every possible unpopular config, despite it possibly working. This is not only common sense, it is what every company does. When you write your software, do you test it on every possible distribution users could use, or just the popular ones?

The common distribution was blacklisted not because it was not tested, but because it clearly has issues observed and reported by the users.

...no, "every company" does not blacklist unpopular configs.

If your software doesn't work in a popular config they don't blacklist it in all the untested less popular configs? You are clear they are blacklisting the GPU driver, not blacklisting a linux install - right?

If a driver does not work in popular configs, and needs to be blacklisted in those configs, your solution is to still whitelist it in other configs and have the browser likely not work.

yes, "every company" does exactly what google did. you are being purposely dense, trying to catch a "technically correct" chance of not admitting the stupidity of your question. The problem is, you are not even technically correct - just purposely dense.

Huh? It appears they did test it, and for that matter (according to the linked post) so did the Nouveau devs who also found it failed the easily accessible test suite.

We agree Nouveau is completely blacklisted right? That's the main problem here.

And the test suite failed on a minor issue where the cause was uncertain, which gets in the way of checking for the bigger definitely-the-driver problem.

If you can hang the GPU with regular webgl content, that's not a minor issue.

That's the reason I have webgl disabled even though I'm on Windows with a supported driver. It opens a gaping security/DoS hole without any benefit (do you ever see webgl used in any website?)

Unfortunately, 'the most widespread Linux distribution' is rounding error in the overall scheme of things from a desktop standpoint so it's actually pretty good that they support it as well as they do. Adding Nouveau to the mix is rounding error on the rounding error. So from Google's standpoint, sure they don't have the resources to test it relative to the number of impacted users. Looking at it another way: it's not like Apple or Microsoft will (ever) provide better support so they can get away with it.

I solved the Chrome/Chromium on Linux problem long ago by switching to Firefox. I'll still fire up Chromium for Google sites and a handful of other sites, but for the most part Firefox has been getting it done for me.

They don't have the resources to "fix" it, they tested it and decided it was not stable enough. What they did was right. Firefox entirely disables GPU acceleration, so I am not sure what your argument is.

No, they don't want to waste time trying to make a broken driver work.

It's an Ubuntu/Nvidia problem, not a Google problem. AMD and Intel open source drivers work just fine.

Exactly. Nvidia have been relentlessly hostile to Free Software for ever. No one who wants an easy life or a stable, upgradeable operating system would buy an Nvidia card.

> most widespread linux distribution for one of the two most widespread GPU producers in the market

That's still less than a percent of the market I think. Maybe shave off another order of magnitude. So the economic argument is not the one to make. However, it sucks nonetheless.

Its still probably hundreds of thousands of users. I hate arguments about "but Linux is only a fraction of the market!" because the total OS / browser usage market is in the billions of people. Even small fractions of that pie could found their own countries and be of reasonable size for a nation.

>found their own countries and be of reasonable size for a nation.

Honestly, you could fill up the number of people using nouveau with chromium in a stadium more likely. From the small pie of linux users, you drill down to nvidia, and then further down to nouveau. All laptop users, even with nvidia cards, will only use the intel gpu unless they explicitly enable the discrete mode and not install the nvidia drivers. Desktop users obviously only buy nvidia if they want to use the binary driver. What do you think remains of the pie ? I haven't met a single person in real life who uses this stack. I love nouveau. That doesn't change the numbers though.

Then of those people, there is a fraction that uses the Nvidea cards that are impacted, and an even smaller number of uses will run into issues.

To save those users from themselves, Google now disabled GPU accelleration for all Ubuntu users.

Seems like a bit silly to me.

If the market share were compelling enough, couldn’t some other maintainer step up and do this work? OSS doesn’t necessarily mean support for everything under the sun at all costs; Chromium may be open source but that doesn’t mean they have carte blanche from Google to test every possible combination of distro and GPU.

This kind of problem specifically doesn't map to "user finds problem, puts money where mouth is on bug bounty to fix it" because actually figuring out your Blink based browser isn't hardware accelerated is at least a nontrivial task most won't even realize until they go "oh wow whys it so much faster on Windows?" and then not even know where to start looking to find out why.

Why should those would-be maintaners help Google? There's always Firefox to fix.

Firefox disables GPU acceleration on Linux entirely, largely for the same reasons.

I'm pretty sure Mozilla just don't care about Linux these days. It's been getting steadily worse, and 64.0 is almost unusable for me due to a bug that has nothing to do with graphics which hangs the whole thing for minutes at a time.