Chrome, Chromium, XP

Hi all,
Chrome is going to end the support for XP. From April on, no security
updates.
What will happen to Chromium and the browsers based on Chromium? Will they
be affected too?

GF

G.F. wrote:
Hi all,
Chrome is going to end the support for XP. From April on, no security
updates.
What will happen to Chromium and the browsers based on Chromium? Will they
be affected too?

GF

The build instructions don't look particularly encouraging.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/...ctions-windows

I really can't say more, as I've never tried to build it.

You'd probably have to attempt to do the build, and see if
any sort of encouraging information appears along the way.

At least the Mozilla site, has "Simple Build" instructions
for Firefox, and I've managed to build that a few times. But the
Chromium site has that "only a determined developer shall pass"
look to it. I call this approach, "begrudgingly open source",
where you are nominally open source, but you lay down a
few spike belts to not encourage people.

How these things typically work:

1) Visual Studio is used, just to gain access to a compiler and linker.
You don't have to even open the IDE. If you wanted to use the
Visual Studio debugger, that would be your own call, and would
open the usual set of issues.

2) The large projects generally have their own build environment,
maybe a ported copy of bash that gives a Linux/Unix like shell,
and the build runs from there. A shell script pokes the build
environment, locates the various versions of Visual Studio,
finds the path to the compiler/linker/assembler, and then calls
them as needed. There may not even necessarily be a VS .prj file,
as the regular notion of "Make" and makefiles is used. The reason
for doing it this way, is to tap into the header files in the
SDK, link to whatever libraries they need (equivalent or better
than MSVCRT and friends). So far, I've not seen any build attempt
that piggy backs on Cygwin.

The Firefox build is getting big enough, that 3GB of memory is
probably not sufficient for the linking step. You might well need
a 64 bit OS to complete the compile/link step. For example, one
Firefox build I did, I had to change the kernel/userspace split
to 1GB/3GB, the compiler happened to be large_address_aware,
and the linking step used every bit of the memory in my
32 bit VM. I could see from that, that future builds would
only "fit" in extremely large memory (i.e. 64 bit OS builds
32 bit executable). I would presume (without checking) that
Chromium could fall prey to the same sort of issues. I'm not
entirely convinced that the "piggish" approach to linking
is completely necessary, and that if the linking was done
in a different order, the memory requirement would be smaller.
But I don't know enough about software to tell
you how to do that. I just considered it pretty amazing that
in Firefox, the 30MB XUL.dll required 3GB of memory to hold
all the temporary information to link it together.

If you've never done one of these builds before, I'm sure it will
be a great learning experience. I now have a 2015 Community Edition
DVD (7GB) and a 2013.4 DVD (7GB) as well, so if I have to do
a build for some reason, I'm spared some of the up-front delay.
Since they add so many files to the OS, I tend to load
everything into a throwaway VM. I'm always a little annoyed
though, when a week later I find myself wanting to get
something out of that VM, and I've already thrown away
the VHD file :-)

Paul

"G.F." ha scritto nel messaggio
...

no security updates.

I point out my first interest is security.

On Sun, 7 Feb 2016 21:39:51 +0100, G.F. wrote:
What will happen to Chromium and the browsers based on Chromium? Will they
be affected too?

Most likely yes. It's due to the fact that all web browsers that are based
on Chromium so far, don't even touch/modify the Chromium's framework, and
any security bug present on Chromium would be well within the core of the
Chromium framework. If a bug is outside the Chromium framework, it would
just a minor bug because outside of the Chromium framework are nothing more
than UI appearance and UI functionalities.