chromium-browser removed from testing

Ok, this happened, chromium-browser was removed from testing and will not be included in Debian squeeze.

Some days ago (before the hard freeze) I contacted the release team and asked about a possible inclusion of Chromium 6 in squeeze. The main reason of this request is that in April there was at least one major refactoring of the SVG code (webkit). The internal webkit copy is too outdated in chromium 5, and backporting any future SVG security patches (and unfortunately the story says they are frequent) is very hard.

I got no answer, and after one week of silence and the hard freeze announcement, I realized that chromium 5 is not supportable and decided to upload chromium 6 in unstable (It was already in experimental). I asked the Release Team to unblock chromium-browser 6.0.472.53~r57914-3 or remove chromium-browser 5.0.375.127~r55887-1 from testing.

Well, after one hour they removed chromium-browser from testing.

I failed, my efforts to get chromium in Squeeze were in vain. Debian failed, a modern and very appreciated web browser will not be included in our next stable release.

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Why would you prefer chromium-browser in sid over google-chrome

I’ve seen a lot of Debian user asking:  ”What is the difference between chromium-browser in sid and google-chrome (stable)?”, “Does chromium-browser support html5, h264, vp8?”

“Why would I prefer chromium-browser in sid over google-chrome (stable)?”

  • chromium-browser is free software, google-chrome isn’t
  • chromium-browser uses (when it is possible) system libs.
  • chromium-browser supports, like google-chrome, the h264 codec (and chromium official builds don’t support it)
  • chromium-browser in sid follows the stable tree, but it contains some important (features and bugfix) backports, as for example VP8/WebM codecs (the stable google-chrome version doesn’t support it),  or the  support for “Ambiance/Radiance and Dust themes button”
  • chromium-browser uses a very recent and high-performance libv8 version, google-chrome (stable) uses an ancient version

BTW, the next step is to get chromium-browser into testing and upload a dev version (6.x) in experimental.

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