Tell HN: Google ships a hidden extension in all Chromium builds for Google Meet

9 points by pgo 3 years ago | 4 comments

Google Meet comes with a few features that no other web apps can use

- The troubleshooting modal shows CPU usage [1]

- When screen sharing you can configure the type of screen share (tab/window/screen) in your code

What is surprising here is that there is no public API for both of these. Instead every Chromium build comes with a special Hangout extension pre-installed. Google Meet then uses `postMessage` to communicate with this extension and call APIs that are available in the Extension context.

Here is the code for the extension inside Chromium source https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chrome/browser/resources/hangout_services/thunk.js?q=thunk.js

This extension is only available to *.google.com web apps https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chrome/browser/resources/hangout_services/manifest.json;l=12

Even though these features might not seem very important, this is still blatant anti-competitive behaviour from google

[1] https://twitter.com/henrylim96/status/1551906796696133637

gkbrk 3 years ago |

This is not the only thing Chrome/Chromium does differently for Google domains.

- The header X-Rlz-String is added to requests that go to the Google home page. This header seems to contain info about language/region, and from which campaign you installed Chrome. Useful for fingerprinting and only Google domains get to have it.

- Incorrect TLS certificates for Google domains are silently and automatically reported to Google.

- X-Chrome-UMA-Enabled and X-Chrome-Variations headers sent to Google domains. The first header seems to be a single "1" value, while the second one seems more useful for fingerprinting.

- Flash-style embeds for old YouTube videos are automatically converted. Other video websites and embeds that no longer work don't get the same treatment.

cloudking 3 years ago |

How is it anti-competitive? Google provides you the browser (for free) and it has some features that make their own products work better. Should they also remove the browser sync feature that uses your Google account?

If you don't like that they have Google specific features, just use another browser. Since most are based on Chromium anyway you'll get similar performance and functionality.

martinni 3 years ago | |

Google doesn't own chromium, they can't just do anything they want with it. Yes they contribute a lot to it but they don't own it.

cloudking 3 years ago | | |

"Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project, mainly developed and maintained by Google."