[Pkg-chromium-maint] Bug#859661: chromium: Poor integration with gnome-shell after extension removal

[Mark Brown]

Package: chromium
Version: 57.0.2987.98-1
Severity: important

With the removal of extension support there is a NEWS.Debian entry
recommending that either a command line option or an environment
variable is set to reenable them if users rely on them.  Unfortunately
there is no information provided on how to actually accomplish either of
these things and no visible facility to do them exists for this in GNOME
3 which is a pretty standard desktop for Debian.  This results in a very
poor user experience, more technical users will probably figure this out
but less technical users who wish to use extensions will struggle to
understand what they're being asked to do (or why).  It's entirely
likely that some will never see the NEWS.Debian entry in the first
place.

We should do a much better job of explaining this change to users.  It
really should be something directly controllable through the browser UI,
or a "with extensions" version of Chromium could be provided in the
system menus.  Documenting some "create a file here" workaround would
probably work as well though it is a bit less discoverable.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages chromium depends on:
ii  libasound2           1.1.3-5
ii  libatk1.0-0          2.22.0-1
ii  libavcodec57         7:3.2.4-1
ii  libavformat57        7:3.2.4-1
ii  libavutil55          7:3.2.4-1
ii  libc6                2.24-9
ii  libcairo2            1.14.8-1
ii  libcups2             2.2.1-8
ii  libdbus-1-3          1.10.16-1
ii  libevent-2.0-5       2.0.21-stable-3
ii  libexpat1            2.2.0-2
ii  libflac8             1.3.2-1
ii  libfontconfig1       2.11.0-6.7+b1
ii  libfreetype6         2.6.3-3+b2
ii  libgcc1              1:6.3.0-11
it  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0   2.36.5-2
ii  libglib2.0-0         2.50.3-2
ii  libgtk2.0-0          2.24.31-2
ii  libharfbuzz0b        1.4.2-1
ii  libicu57             57.1-5
ii  libjpeg62-turbo      1:1.5.1-2
ii  libminizip1          1.1-8+b1
ii  libnspr4             2:4.12-6
ii  libnss3              2:3.26.2-1
ii  libpango-1.0-0       1.40.4-1
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0  1.40.4-1
ii  libpng16-16          1.6.28-1
ii  libpulse0            10.0-1
ii  libre2-3             20170101+dfsg-1
ii  libsnappy1v5         1.1.4-1
ii  libstdc++6           6.3.0-11
ii  libvpx4              1.6.1-3
ii  libwebp6             0.5.2-1
ii  libwebpdemux2        0.5.2-1
ii  libx11-6             2:1.6.4-3
ii  libx11-xcb1          2:1.6.4-3
ii  libxcb1              1.12-1
ii  libxcomposite1       1:0.4.4-2
ii  libxcursor1          1:1.1.14-1+b4
ii  libxdamage1          1:1.1.4-2+b3
ii  libxext6             2:1.3.3-1+b2
ii  libxfixes3           1:5.0.3-1
ii  libxi6               2:1.7.9-1
ii  libxml2              2.9.4+dfsg1-2.2
ii  libxrandr2           2:1.5.1-1
ii  libxrender1          1:0.9.10-1
ii  libxslt1.1           1.1.29-2.1
ii  libxss1              1:1.2.2-1
ii  libxtst6             2:1.2.3-1
ii  x11-utils            7.7+3+b1
ii  xdg-utils            1.1.1-1
ii  zlib1g               1:1.2.8.dfsg-5

Versions of packages chromium recommends:
ii  fonts-liberation  1:1.07.4-2

Versions of packages chromium suggests:
pn  chromium-driver    <none>
pn  chromium-l10n      <none>
pn  chromium-shell     <none>
pn  chromium-widevine  <none>

-- no debconf information