It depends on what you care about when you say "open". If you care about security/privacy and the fact that you're running potentially Trojan-infected code on your machine, then any non-open code makes a difference.
The fact you use a connection to the internet opens yiu to many nefarious means to "screw you over". I can think of subtle things like changing adservers to backbone providers, router protocol redirections, ssl master cert spoofs (care of us govt), and many others.
Unless you were the types that freaked out on mm256.dat and nsakey, use standard security and you're fine.
If you did freak out, im sure we can work out a GPS-login script that watches location, bloodtype, retinal scan, passphrase, and voice scan to get a guest account.
How so? Percentage of code? # of features? If you want to make claims like that then actually make them, don't just wave your hands.
You're arguing over the degree of something which is just silly. Either both count or neither counts. Who cares if 10% of Chrome's code is proprietary and 15% of Safari's code is proprietary, or vice versa? If one counts as an open source browser then so does the other.
The important pieces that actually deal with content are all open so I would count them both, but that's just me. If you want to draw lines and make it sound scientific then you better show us some numbers. You don't get to draw imaginary lines because you just think that's where a line should be, if Chrome is more open tell us how.
I guess you could quantify it with % of code. I've never actually snooped around inside of there, and I'm basing what I was saying off of things I've read here on HN. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've gotten the impression that a larger percentage of the Safari code base is not open source than Chrome.
Saying that any percent >0 causes the software to not be considered open source is also drawing a line. Either way in my opinion it's subjective where you choose to draw it.
I agree that Safari should be included. I was simply disagreeing with the parent, because I got the impression that he or she was saying they are equal. Also, if someone decided they wanted to draw the line somewhere where it would exclude Safari, I would understand where they're coming from, and agree, as Chrome is more open sourcy.
Edit:
> "If you want to draw lines and make it sound scientific then you better show us some numbers. "
I'm not sure where you're getting this. I wasn't trying to draw lines or making anything sound scientific. All I said was that more of Chrome is open source, that's it. Like I said, I feel it's subjective as to where you draw the line, which is why I was disagreeing with parent. I felt that he or she was making an objective claim with how it should be. In my opinion if you insisted on being objective about it, you would probably have to measure the % code or whatever. I don't believe that the objective view on it is treating any software with greater than 0% proprietary software the same.
More … how? What matters is the engine, who cares about the chassis? It would be truly idiotic to include Chrome but to exclude Safari. That just does not make sense.
Sure, more of Chrome’s chassis is open source (though not really), but who the hell cares about that? All things considered, Safari and Chrome are both pretty open source. What matters, anyway.
If all that mattered was the rendering engine, then Chrome would never have gotten more than 1% browser marketshare, and Firefox would reign supreme. It's pretty obvious to anyone that's paid attention over the last few years that the surrounding UI, Javascript engine, and experience encapsulating the rendering engine is just as important, if not more so.
With Chrome basically the entire UI, including preferences, extensions engine, syncing, and automatic and partial updates are completely open source as part of the Chromium project. Chrome merely puts the Google logo on the cover and packages some pieces of software that can't otherwise be distributed due to licensing constraints. Developers don't consider Ubuntu closed-source just because it has the ability to package closed-source software and drivers with it.
In short: there's no way you can consider Safari an open-source project. There are several ways to classify Chrome as open-source, to which many developers agree.
I do? I think the parts of the browser that aren't the rendering engine are important too. That being said, I honestly don't really care about the original argument. I agree that Safari should be included as open source.
My point was just that I think Chrome is measurably more open source. I know that's vague and you can quantify by number of lines, whatever. Since Chrome is "more" open source, wouldn't someone be able to fairly draw a line that includes Chrome but not Safari?
In my mind where one draws that line is completely subjective. I think where you draw the line is equally subjective.
The part where you were treating Chrome and Safari as equal in terms of open-souce-ness is what I disagree with.
Google do not promote builds of Chromium since they want users using Chrome. If you want to run Chromium, the open source browser, but do not want to build it yourself, you can download the latest builds (and older builds) for all the different platforms from the buildbot server:
