Chromium updates on trusty

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1

In the past few months, the upstream chromium project has started using recent C++ features that are not supported by the trusty (14.04) toolchain.

Until now we managed to work around the issue and build the latest releases on trusty by reverting selected commits, but this has become very difficult as the adoption of new C++ features upstream starts spreading all over the codebase (not to mention that reverting those commits might introduce subtle bugs).

This post is to officially announce that no more security updates will be published for chromium-browser on trusty. The last version available is 65.0.3325.181-0ubuntu0.14.04.1.

People who require an up-to-date version of chromium are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu (16.04 or 18.04), or install the chromium snap (which in my limited testing works well on trusty):

snap install chromium

Please report issues with the snap on the snapcraft forum or by filing bugs on launchpad.

All other supported Ubuntu releases (16.04, 17.10, 18.04) will continue receiving chromium updates.

We are working on making the snap package the one and only officially supported way of always running an up-to-date chromium, more on this in a separate thread.

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2

What is the migration plan for the trusty (deb) archive? Remove chromium altogether?

3

Either upgrade to xenial/bionic if you can afford it, or install the snap and use that instead of the deb (you can uninstall the deb, but itā€™s not strictly required, both packages can co-exist). The command to launch the snap is chromium (as opposed to the deb, which is chromium-browser).

I am keen to know where the snap falls behind the deb, so testing and feedback very much welcome!

4

One of the great things about snappy - new apps on old operating systems is a-OK!

Maybe another Chromium update could be issued that gives the user a dialogue on startup (with a checkbox saying ā€˜donā€™t ask againā€™) with a link to, say, snap://chromium telling them to install that (and then asking them to run sudo apt remove chromium-browser if they want) for continued security updates? Also when the AppStream work lands and maybe Software grows a feature to merge together entries for the same app distributed in different formats (e.g. Deb, snap, and Flatpak) maybe the snap could be made default.

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5

Hello,

Something I donā€™t understand is why last chromium available version on trusty is a version with a major regression :

Why not rollbacked to previous version (ie: 64) ?

Thank you

6

Thatsā€™s unfortunate indeed, but rolling back to a previous version is impractical and would re-introduce a number of security issues that were fixed in 65.

If you canā€™t upgrade from trusty, have you tried the snap version of chromium?

snap install chromium