Yeah, that part was a bit weird since he only mentioned the "rendering engines WebKit and Blink" being open source, while both have fully open source browsers built on them that are pretty easy to build yourself (especially compared to Firefox's current build process, though that is improving in leaps and bounds).
That said, the big difference is in how widespread they are. While he does use an explicitly unqualified "advantage over all other browser vendors", if you think instead about a verified build system that has guarantees for significant numbers of internet users, your Chromium population is much more limited. Probably the majority are the linux distros that ship with chromium and the rest are people who are largely building from source anyways.
While there are other, open-source browser's built on Webkit and Chrome source code, what a typical user downloads from Google is not an open source product you can build youself.
That is not quite correct (and what's correct is just repeating what I just wrote).
If you download source code, you can build these browsers. If you go to their release pages, you can download these browsers. If you apt-get install chromium-browser, you'll get one of those browsers.
You're correct that Chrome and Safari both contain large chunks of closed source code, but they are the "other" to the source code. The source code builds just fine.
And yes, the open source versions aren't what users usually download, which is exactly what I said. The largest users of Chromium are from Linux distros that use it and people building from source themselves. I'm not aware of any major users of Webkit builds directly, but there are many smaller browsers that are themselves open source and using Webkit or embedding Chromium (and I imagine a handful now using Blink).
People tend to use the concept of a "grandmother" who downloads what the site offers her, which in Google's case is the closed-source non-verifiable Chrome. However, people usually counter these grandmother arguments noting that the grandma has no big understanding of privacy and so Chrome is fine for her.
However, in this case, a more apt concept of a "mother" should be applied -- i.e. somebody who understands the values of privacy on the internet, but still gets influenced by what the website offers her.
So me, you and the hypothetical mother all want a browser that's supposed to be as safe from intrusions by the NSA as possible, but unlike the two of us who will understand Google's claims like "Get a fast, free web browser" in the proper context, the mother would not.
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My point is that I believe we should strive to make it very clear, for this particular group of "mothers", which browser is as secure to intrusions as possible and which is only "fast and free" according to the corporation that issues it (and has a harder-to-find open-source variant).
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Yeah, that part was a bit weird since he only mentioned the "rendering engines WebKit and Blink" being open source, while both have fully open source browsers built on them that are pretty easy to build yourself (especially compared to Firefox's current build process, though that is improving in leaps and bounds).
That said, the big difference is in how widespread they are. While he does use an explicitly unqualified "advantage over all other browser vendors", if you think instead about a verified build system that has guarantees for significant numbers of internet users, your Chromium population is much more limited. Probably the majority are the linux distros that ship with chromium and the rest are people who are largely building from source anyways.
While there are other, open-source browser's built on Webkit and Chrome source code, what a typical user downloads from Google is not an open source product you can build youself.
That is not quite correct (and what's correct is just repeating what I just wrote).
If you download source code, you can build these browsers. If you go to their release pages, you can download these browsers. If you apt-get install chromium-browser, you'll get one of those browsers.
You're correct that Chrome and Safari both contain large chunks of closed source code, but they are the "other" to the source code. The source code builds just fine.
And yes, the open source versions aren't what users usually download, which is exactly what I said. The largest users of Chromium are from Linux distros that use it and people building from source themselves. I'm not aware of any major users of Webkit builds directly, but there are many smaller browsers that are themselves open source and using Webkit or embedding Chromium (and I imagine a handful now using Blink).
People tend to use the concept of a "grandmother" who downloads what the site offers her, which in Google's case is the closed-source non-verifiable Chrome. However, people usually counter these grandmother arguments noting that the grandma has no big understanding of privacy and so Chrome is fine for her.
However, in this case, a more apt concept of a "mother" should be applied -- i.e. somebody who understands the values of privacy on the internet, but still gets influenced by what the website offers her.
So me, you and the hypothetical mother all want a browser that's supposed to be as safe from intrusions by the NSA as possible, but unlike the two of us who will understand Google's claims like "Get a fast, free web browser" in the proper context, the mother would not.
---
My point is that I believe we should strive to make it very clear, for this particular group of "mothers", which browser is as secure to intrusions as possible and which is only "fast and free" according to the corporation that issues it (and has a harder-to-find open-source variant).