I installed Chromium and it comes with some non-removeable extensions with super shady sounding permissions. Are these even legit?
Chrome is not part of Purism repo. The Chrome Media Router extensions is serviced from the chromium repository.
Sorry, my mistake!! I have altered OP
Still, can anyone explain those pre-installed extensions or am I asking in the wrong place?
I don’t have those installed by default in my Chrome browser.
Chrome keep track of your previously installed extensions, so you most likely installed these on an older installation.
No, I received my Librem about a week ago and I haven’t ever downloaded any extensions for it
Librems don’t come with Chrome pre-installed. So you must have installed it yourself.
I did install Chromium, but I’ve never installed extensions, unless somehow it was part of the install process (i.e. somehow bundled in)
I installed it via terminal with the following command:
sudo apt-get install chromium
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
chromium-common libre2-3
Suggested packages:
chromium-l10n chromium-shell chromium-driver chromium-widevine
The following NEW packages will be installed:
chromium chromium-common libre2-3
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 177 kB/37.8 MB of archives.
After this operation, 139 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
I don’t have additional software repos, so isn’t this from the Purism repo?
Ok, I just installed Chromium open-source browser, as opposed to google chrome. Sorry, my bad, I got confused between the 2. Looking a little closer to Chrome Media Router its a service that allows media routing via chromecast so it requires quite a few permissions to manage media interactions,
All good. Though it’s weird that Chromium has extensions that Chrome doesn’t come with and that you can’t disable.
Perhaps towards the Purism devs: Is there any method of uninstalling the extensions from the Chromium build in the Purism repo?
The “extentions” are actually internals to Chromium and for some reason they just announce themselves as extensions on Chromium for Linux. Has something to do with how it’s developed I guess.
I wouldn’t want to get rid of any of those if I were you. They’re all quite essential to how Chromium works. If you got rid of the PDF viewer for example, you wouldn’t be able to conveniently open PDF files in your browser anymore.
Check out chrome://flags if you want a slew of experimental options you can play with though. Careful though.
Anyway, I wouldn’t change anything, you’re all good and these aren’t suspect or anything.
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Well, the PDF reader I get, but I don’t feel like I need a media router extension (which doesn’t appear in Chrome) and I have no idea why I’d want a crypto-token extension?
I’ll check out the flags though, cheers.
You can run Chromium from the command-line with the --disable-extensions flag. The only drawback is that any extensions you want to use will also be disabled.
chromium --disable-extensions
Is Chromium free software? I’m noticing that it is no longer listed in the Software app. I did a recent re-install of the OS, it is fully updated and upgraded, as well as Spectre patched. I am running this from a non Librem device, but I can’t imagine that would have any bearing on what software I see.
Can anyone confirm or deny that Chromium is no longer in the repo, please?
A bit late but I also cannot find chromium in the Software app nor is it listed in the PureOS repository.