Add boot to Chrome(ium/Brave), VLC

    LibreELEC's main idea to be a JEOS just for Kodi seems increasingly outdated. It is not that Kodi isn't good any more; the problem is that addon builders (being one man shows not corporations) are nowadays incapable of keeping up with content. And even if they produce an addon that initially satisfies the demand for a specific content provider, this provider changes something in the way its content is presented which breaks the addon; by design or accident, who knows...

    IMHO the only way to keep LibreELEC up to date is to drop its exclusive focus on being a shell for starting Kodi and adding Chrome(ium) and VLC to its launching capabilities. After all, being Linux with a GUI and a fluxbox window manager makes LibreELEC capable of launching everything a Linux box can launch.

    Offering a Chrome(ium) addon is not a solution. It has been tried and tested, and found to not work 100%-ly.

    Adding VLC to Chrome(ium) makes sense because VLC currently handles IPTV/VOD playlists better than any other program out there.

    My proposal is not to downgrade Kodi: content which can be viewed inside Kodi's addons is presented much better than it could be within standalone Chrome(ium) or standalone VLC. The problem is that A LOT of content out there does not fit into Kodi, and the addon developers being one man shows and working for free have no way of keeping up with the demand.

    There is, telling this for years, a integrated browser for Kodi in the works that reaches the point it could maybe finally happen "soon" (K21).

    The problem with booting into a browser is how you want to control this etc, then you quickly need a mouse and keyboard to make anything happens. Booting into chrome could be done today rather easily, but the overall usability is limited without shipping a real desktop or some replacement with it.

    LE's niche is (and will probably remain) users with offline media, DVB services, and limited streaming media. Anyone who's serious about the online streaming media world should look to run Kodi on Android (a box/stick with L1 widevine etc.) or perhaps an AppleTV device that are natively part of the walled garden ecosystems that all the streaming media services reside in. There simply aren't enough developers working on Kodi or LE or the time/money resources that would be needed to do anything different. Adding a browser isn't going to noticeably change that, and using VLC isn't going to happen when Kodi is essentially a big fancy wrapper around deeply embedded FFMpeg. At least FFMpeg and VLC share common roots.