If anyone from the Chrome/Chromium team is reading this, I want to say a big "Thank you". Chrome is great software, and it's making my life better (I probably spend something like 50-60 hours a week in it). I'm sure it's the case for many others too. Keep up the good work!
Also triple thankyou for actually producing packages of your work rather than 'here's a tarball, or wait 6 months for your distro to do it' like Firefox does.
Those packages are great, my only complaint is that they (at least the Debian ones) don't include a changelog file. It would be great to see what's new through the standard Debian facility when they release new versions.
They also install in /opt - which is wrong when you are using the packaging system for your distribution. They also make a number of other changes to the system.
Much better to install the official debian ones - they are less likely to mess with your system, and whoever is releasing them seems to keep up with the releases, so you are not behind.
According to, IIRC, either Randy Russell or Alan Cox a decade ago, /opt was added to the FHS at the request of the proprietary Unix vendors. The idea of 'optional' 'third party' software is ridiculous in an Open Source OS. Throwing binaries, libraries, config etc. outside standard folders means long library paths, long binary paths, config that can't be backed up from a central location, etc.
Eg, say Debian include Chrome (as Chrome, not Chromium) in their next release. It will move from where it is now to the normal locations for unimportant software beneath /usr.
That said, I don't really care that much anymore. There's very little expectation for quality finished software on Linux in general:
* Most apps aren't packaged, even for the two major distros people use
* half of GUI apps still don't install with shortcuts
* WMs still invent their own .desktop replacements
* package descriptions for 'foobar' are 'the foobar package' or 'libtoolkit GUI for libfoobar'
* service descriptions are 'starts the foobar service'
* man pages either don't exist, point elsewhere or consist of 'debian says we have to have a man page, this is a man page, alas it has no content'.
My understanding is that /opt is for programs that do not use the package manager. For example if you download a .tar file, and it has an installation script.
If it uses the package manager it goes in /usr like a regular program.
Congratulations on great work! Alas Chrome had been unusable for me on Linux for the last couple of months... but this post just spurred me to find out why. Turned out my bookmark file was large - 6,000 items - with one particular bookmark (ironically an official Google blog entry on making your website faster) having gone forth and multiplied over 5,000 times. (perhaps aided by a bug in an unstable version?) The unfortunate and frustrating effect being that, on installing Chrome on a new computer - something I've done several times recently - everything would work fine until the sync kicked in. At which point opening or closing tabs would go 100% CPU for over a minute. It's only now in trying to save my bookmark file to try out this new version that I discovered the problem. Happy to be back!
Also wanted to say thanks, especially for making all user-tracking optional.
In addition, I'm really happy to see Apple and Google keep cooperating on making WebKit better. Together you've now built the best desktop and mobile browser technology.
