Debian prefers dynamic linking: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html#...
Whereas Google wants everything vendored: https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/chromium/
It allows such drift from upstream, freedom from responsibility to maintain yourself as something modern. It increases both the size of what you have to distribute, and the memory profile. And it means that when a security update is necessary, each library consumer has to be responsible & on-time with delivering updates rapidly.
It feels like it was created out of such petty, small needs & wants. It's convenient to be able to copy a binary around anywhere, & have it just work. It's convenient to stand off, on your own, ignorant of the world you exist in. But it's so contrary to me to good healthy engineering practices, enables such radical irresponsibility & divergence. I don't see a lot of push back to static linking, but it feels like a modern & popular plague to me. Go, rust, the whole world software development world seems to be increasingly less interested in systems, & more interested in itself.
To your point about security patches in dependencies, Chrome auto updates itself to patch vulnerabilities. Their users on Windows/Mac appreciate this behavior. Switching to a different model for Linux is work on their part, isn't it?
Static linking based distribution like snaps might also achieve most of the goals listed above if the file system can share relevant file blocks across applications in a seamless manner. So Chromium could bring in its own glibc or use glibc file blocks already pulled in by another application.
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* You can use chromium flatpak version from Flathub
* You can add the Linux Mint repos, and install the chromium package from there (untested)
* You can install the chromium snap (not recommended due to slow launch times)
I used debian on desktops and laptops spanning several decades and IMO a typical desktop user probably doesn't want to stay on stable, that's been my experience anyway. Machines I don't use interactively I've kept on stable though.
I suppose if I lean more on containers for development and flatpack etc for programs it would be easier to maintain a Debian stable system. Debian has been great for me aside from having older libraries!
buster (misc): 83.0.4103.116-1~deb10u3
bullseye (misc): 83.0.4103.116-3.1
sid (misc): 83.0.4103.116-3.1
experimental (misc): 84.0.4147.105-1
Tho the .deb binary is not up to date yet https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...