Hello! I currently maintain the Chrome Flatpak on Flathub beta, and I wanted to share some of the plans to move to stable, as well as request some consistent testing for future releases.
TLDR: I have had a lot of requests to move this to Flathub stable, and I’m looking to clean up everything and do this by the end of March. For some context on my concerns, the way Chrome works via Zypak is fundamentally a lot more hack-ish than Chromium, and thus has a higher risk of breaking on updates. (Yes, this applies to Electron apps too, but Chrome is undoubtedly more complex, and Electron releases will come after anyway, i.e. Chrome would break first). There are users using unstable Chrome releases that have reported Zypak bugs in the past (thanks @tinywrkb!), but I want something a bit more reliable to be in place here.
In addition, Zypak has two modes of operation, one for Flatpak 1.8+ if unprivileged user namespaces are enabled, and one for any other cases. However, the latter is rarely used at this point, and although it’s probably fine for Electron (it only ever forks the Zygote once or twice anyway), I’m a bit more hesitant here, because again, Chrome is the most likely one to break first.
To compound all this, there’s a decently high chance I’ll be switching to Chromium soon as my primary browser due to its arm64 support (feel free to guess why), so I won’t be putting Chrome through day-to-day testing like currently.
With all this in mind, I have two key points to my plan:
- I want to keep the beta channel alive for Chrome beta/dev builds and would like some testers to volunteer to run this as a primary driver and report issues! This would allow to find any Zypak breakage before the Chrome stable release comes out, giving some decent buffer time in between. (This will likely be a separate app ID, so you could, say, install both beta/dev & stable, then sign into both with the same Google account so everything syncs over to stable, so you have a fallback in case of breakage.)
-
I will likely require Flatpak 1.8+ w/ unprivileged user namespaces for the stable channel (but not unstable!), unless I can get some testers to explicitly run this. This hasn’t seemed to be a super major issue for adoption so far for Chromium itself, and anyone on an older version could use the unstable channels (or I might add an override or similar w/ a more explicit warning). Again, this is simply much less tested, so you’re kind of subjecting yourself to a less stable experience anyway. The exception would be if I can have some people testing this more reliably to make sure it stays working! But again, I’m doubtful it’s going to be that much of a requirement, again given Chromium’s popularity here. (We require Flatpak 1.6+ anyway due to some
device=all
bugs.)
Meanwhile, I’m going to be spending some time looking into some reported issues with desktop icons (again! so much fun!) and removing the warning page on startup, i.e. generally trying to make it as polished as possible. There are some other areas I’m looking into as well (do we need to relax filesystem permissions, or are new portal versions widespread enough? etc).
(Note: I am aware I said I was originally planning on stabilizing by the end of the month on the Matrix, and I was going to post this earlier as well, but to be entirely frank, everything going on has sucked out a lot of motivation here, hence the month delay.)
TL;DR: I would very much like people willing to test beta/dev Chrome releases and report issues to trap Zypak bugs / required changes before they hit stable!! I’ll be prepping this part by the end of the week most likely, and then everyone can go wild.