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.