I don't think your theory fits the facts...

The bug is from 2018, and was fixed three years later. So it doesn't seem like there was any kind of special prioritization going on here. It was also fixed by a person working at Microsoft, not by somebody at Google.

I think the point that was if anyone but Google wanted this, it'd get laughed all the way to WONTFIX.

Yes, I understand that's that was the point. But again, Google clearly didn't actually particularly want this since nobody from that company actually worked on this bug during the three years it was open.

Your suggestion seems equally invalid. The Chromium bug tracker currently has about 9k open feature requests. A lot of them are more niche than this, have no indication on the bug that they're relevant to Google, and have still not been closed as WONTFIX.

So it really was not a valid point to start with, and I don't understand why you're doubling down on it like that.

As shown in the changelog, the bug was filed by a user @amplifiedit.com, and was seen as a worthwhile bug to fix by Brian Malcolm "Taking ownership as the client team in BVE will work on this item"[0]; however, it was stalled for nearly 3 years until Eric submitted a patch for it[1]. While Google thinks it's worthwhile to fix, Microsoft is trying to have a faster-than-usual rise in adoption for their new Edge which is based on Chromium, so that means fixing as many things as possible that their business/EDU customers complain about.

BTW Google already allowed MDM (device) admins to disable devtools, but everyone involved in the issue also wanted it to disable view-source since it allowed students to look at the HTML.

0: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=895462...

1: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=895462...

Is it remotely possible to vote against this policy? Who controls Chromium features – I know it's open source and thus one could always fork it, but how is the project governed? "Benign" dictatorship?

The best way to vote against changes like this is to use Firefox. The people who govern the project will pay attention to market share much better than anything else other than forking the project.

I think you may have some core assumption that open source software has a voting system when none really exists and it’s either a committee or a corporation that gives no voting rights whatsoever. Participation instead gets things in when your are both trusted and the governance approves.

Here's the link to vote, no registration required: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

I don't see where to vote on issues on that page.

Whooooosh!

All I found was an insecure browser...

~3/4 out of Firefox users have their analytics disabled

if you're invisible your vote doesn't count anywhere ....

If you depend on metrics you get a product like Firefox. Worse with every iteration.

Do you have source for that?

You think you should get to vote against other people's local policies? Just you, or do we each get a vote? Where do I get my list of your policies in case I need to vote against some of them?

That's a rather aggressive way of answering my question. I meant "who decided to let chromium disable view-source, and if this decision is unpopular, can it be reconsidered?".

Your local policy is yours, but in much the same way that I don't think it's a good idea for an OS provider to provide a single, easy-to-use button saying "spy on this user who I pinky-swear is a member of my family under 18 and tell me everything they do and where their mobile is", an option to permit the disabling of view-source in a mainstream browser does not fit easily with me. I accept that there might be some situations in which you'd want to do it, but honestly it's the thin-edge of the wedge.

"Benign dictatorship" is a common form of open-source project governance; it's not unreasonable to expect that is the case here (with Google, or a part of it, as the dictator). That being said, many open-source projects are managed in a way other than "benign dictatorship". Debian, for example, famously uses the Condorcet method [1] if there are any significant ideological disputes; see this vote [2] about Richard Stallman for an example.

To my mind, a browser supporting -- in whatever form -- an option to disallow "view-source" could well be a controversial enough decision to necessitate a vote through this means. I don't know how Chromium is governed, and all I meant to do was ask how.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method [2] https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_002#outcome

Isn't it closing the hole that allowed you to bypass the blocklist by using source viewer rather than adding a way to block viewing the source altogether?

I would argue that any client side blocking is pointless at best, and points to extreme lack of actual security at worst.

Why would you want to vote against this change? It's local policy and has no bearing on anyone else.

Sites cannot enable it.

Security by obscurity. It’s the Enterprise way.