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quietpain | 2 years ago

I recently installed the STM32 Cube IDE from ST [1] and discovered that it contains a stealth binary of Google's Chrome in my home directory. The fans started spinning and I found the culprit pretty fast, but if you delete the Chrome executable in the double-hidden directory it just gets installed again at the next run of the IDE.

I wonder what percentage of market share can be attributed to this kind of clients that are used not for browsing but for lazily loading some web interface or product page.

[1] https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html

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rewmie|2 years ago

That's a great point. Both Chrome and Edge are widely used as WebView drivers by some applications, and whether the user likes it or not they end up using one of the browsers that's dubbed market leader. Does Firefox even provide any webview-capable deployment option? If they managed to put together one that didn't weight around 100MB or phoned home, I'm sure it would be widely adopted once it's out.