A Firefox user plays with Chromium
Discussions of Chrome tend to run into confusion based on the fact that there are actually two related browsers. Chromium is an open-source (BSD-licensed) project, while Chrome is a binary-only program available for free download. Chromium is the upstream for Chrome; they differ in that Google adds a bunch of proprietary stuff (Flash player, PDF viewer, codecs), an automatic update system, and a more colorful logo to Chrome. Both browsers are available for a number of Linux distributions. Anybody wanting a fully-free system will naturally stick to Chromium.
For a user moving to Chromium from Firefox, there is, at the outset, little in the way of culture shock in store. The Chromium developers seem to have put a great deal of work into making that transition easy. Chromium will pick up a lot of information from an existing Firefox installation, including bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and more. (As an aside, it's worth noting just how easily Chromium can get its hands on the Firefox password store; any other program can do the same). The appearance is quite similar, and many of the keyboard shortcuts are the same. After a while one begins to notice little things that are missing (the combination of shift and the scroll wheel to move through the history is at the top of your editor's list), but it mostly just works.
Firefox makes a huge variety of configuration options available to users; Chromium has a rather smaller set. Most of the important things are there, but, once again, anybody who has made extensive use of Firefox's configurability will run into annoying gaps. At the top of the "pet peeve" list here is the lack of any ability to control animated images. Your editor is an easily distracted type; text is much harder to read when there are images jumping around on the screen. The "animate once" option in Firefox has always seemed like an ideal compromise; it enables viewing of kitten animations sent by one's daughter while filtering out ongoing obnoxiousness. Chromium users have no such feature.
Also missing is any sort of mechanism for associating "helper" programs with content types. There appears to be no way, for example, to tell the browser to pass a PDF file to evince or an m3u file to the user's choice of media player. As a result, Chromium, out of the box, is totally unable to deal with PDF files; one must install an extension to be able to view them at all. (Chrome has a PDF viewer built into it). This behavior seems to be driven by the ChromeOS use case, where the concept of applications outside the browser is deemed suspicious at best. For a full desktop system, though, it is limiting.
Extensions for Chromium are not in short supply. AdBlock is there, for those who want it. On the other hand, the lack of NoScript hurts; the "NotScript" extension tries to fill that gap, but it's not the same. NotScript setup is bizarre, requiring the user to hand-edit a file named
~/.config/chromium/Default/Extensions/\
odjhifogjcknibkahlpidmdajjpkkcfn/0.9.6_0/CHANGE__PASSWORD__HERE.js
and insert a password which, seemingly, is never used again. NotScript seems to break more sites than NoScript does; the Red Hat bugzilla site, for example, simply refreshes forever with scripts disabled. NotScript also breaks Chrome's PDF viewer unless scripts are enabled for the site hosting the PDF file. There is (it must be said) no direct equivalent to the Firemacs extension providing Emacs keybindings; a similar extension failed to work. Many of these features are apparently harder to implement in Chromium than they are in Firefox; it seems likely that Chromium's emphasis on sandboxing and security, along with an attempt to make extensions portable across releases, may be to blame here.
Various glitches notwithstanding, Chromium is a capable and full-featured browser. It does appear to be quite fast, though Firefox's speed has rarely been a problem in recent times. Having done the work to switch over to this browser and integrate it into his workflow, your editor does not feel any immediate need to switch back to Firefox.
Chromium is promoted as an open source project, but the community has learned that Google often sees "open source" in its own unique way. It would appear, though, that Chromium is actually run like a real open-source development project. The project's code repository contains commits from some 759 developers, most of whom have been active in the last year. Developers tend to use @chromium.org email addresses, making it hard to tell how many of them come from outside Google. The project does give commit privileges to outside developers, though - they are not limited to the submission of patches. Google must certainly maintain a certain degree of control over the direction of the project, but Chromium does truly seem to have a development community of its own.
Despite its free license and growing adoption, Chromium tends to be supported reluctantly by many distributors. The project's release cycles are unclear at best, and its practice of forking and bundling libraries does not sit well with distributors; see this posting from Tom Callaway for a long discussion on the disconnect between Chromium and distributors. Chromium has an open bug tracker entry on making the project more distributor-friendly, but it seems to have more cobwebs than contributions. For reasons that have been extensively discussed over the years, web browser projects seem to have a hard time fitting into the distributor ecosystem.
Even so, there are repositories for a number of common distributions. Some work better than others; the Fedora repository does not support Rawhide, for example. But just about anybody wanting to run Chromium without building it (a daunting process which requires a 64-bit machine just to have the address space to do the link) on Linux can do so. That said, it's probably a fair guess that an awful lot of Linux users are running the proprietary Chrome releases. One should never underestimate the allure of a working YouTube. For those who would like to take that path, there are a number of "release channels" with varying distances from the bleeding edge.
To conclude: Chromium is a capable tool which has brought an interesting
new level of competition to the browser space. The project's emphasis on
speed and security are certainly welcome, as is the relatively open (for
Google) nature of the project itself. On the down side, one might well
wonder whether it is wise to put yet another piece of web infrastructure
into a single company's hands. Google's intentions seem to be good now,
but, as we've often seen, companies can change alignment overnight. So
while Chromium is a welcome option to have, it might be best if it does not
take over. The continued existence and success of strong competitors in
the free software community can only be a good thing.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 14:15 UTC (Thu)
by oever (guest, #987)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jul 7, 2011 14:20 UTC (Thu)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted Jul 8, 2011 8:22 UTC (Fri)
by rilder (guest, #59804)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 8, 2011 16:15 UTC (Fri)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted Jul 8, 2011 23:20 UTC (Fri)
by oever (guest, #987)
[Link]
Eventually, I'd like to be able to investigate every aspect of the traffic and modify it as needed. This should be easy to do in Node. Performance is not an issue: this is for personal use.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 14:17 UTC (Thu)
by clugstj (subscriber, #4020)
[Link] (3 responses)
I built Chromium just yesterday on a 32-bit machine (running Gentoo) without any problem.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 14:23 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 7, 2011 17:21 UTC (Thu)
by clugstj (subscriber, #4020)
[Link]
Posted Jul 7, 2011 17:28 UTC (Thu)
by leiz (guest, #46265)
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Posted Jul 7, 2011 14:27 UTC (Thu)
by whiprush (guest, #23428)
[Link] (14 responses)
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsG...
Posted Jul 7, 2011 14:35 UTC (Thu)
by rlehy (subscriber, #46873)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Jul 7, 2011 15:43 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:03 UTC (Thu)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (6 responses)
I wouldn't be surprised if your setup is a little different than the average user's. If you do 'xdg-open some_pdf.pdf' do you get what you want?
(Not saying that that's necessarily what Chromium does, but if even that doesn't work then you have a deeper issue.)
Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:17 UTC (Thu)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (3 responses)
Actually, a quick Google suggests that it is, which is good since that's Clearly The Right Thing.
If you have xdg-utils installed, "xdg-mime default evince.desktop application/pdf" *should* fix it. If you don't - there's your problem.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 19:43 UTC (Thu)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted Jul 7, 2011 21:08 UTC (Thu)
by gidoca (subscriber, #62438)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 12, 2011 15:12 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link]
Tell it to use /usr/bin/xdg-open for everything and it should DTRT. Suboptimal but better than setting every single file type manually.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 17:38 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 12, 2011 15:15 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link]
Hmm, maybe it's hardcoded to expect to be able to open PDFs with a plugin rather than an external application - although comments on other forums seem to indicate otherwise.
I must confess I use Chrome so I've never had to worry about it.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 13:19 UTC (Fri)
by njd27 (subscriber, #5770)
[Link]
So the PDF behaviour is a design feature, not a bug.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 22:56 UTC (Thu)
by kripkenstein (guest, #43281)
[Link] (3 responses)
> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsG...
It's not up to date. For example, it's missing the fact that Print Preview is missing in Chromium - it's proprietary code (tied somehow to the proprietary PDF viewer that is bundled).
Also, being proprietary code as it is, there is no clear way to tell if the list is complete. There can be many additional customizations they are not telling us about.
Posted Jul 12, 2011 17:07 UTC (Tue)
by martine (guest, #59979)
[Link] (2 responses)
Print preview is implemented as just generating a PDF and displaying it with the built-in PDF viewer. It can't work without a PDF plugin so if you don't have one it falls back on your system's print dialog. (PS: there is no free PDF plugin.)
If you find any real omissions from that list, I'd be happy to update it.
Posted Jul 12, 2011 21:30 UTC (Tue)
by kripkenstein (guest, #43281)
[Link]
Therefore this definitely looks like an omission from the list. Chrome has working print preview, Chromium does not.
Posted Jul 12, 2011 22:30 UTC (Tue)
by jrn (subscriber, #64214)
[Link]
Isn't mozplugger (+, say, epdfview) one?
Posted Jul 7, 2011 14:56 UTC (Thu)
by exadon (guest, #5324)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Jul 7, 2011 15:03 UTC (Thu)
by nbecker (subscriber, #35200)
[Link] (2 responses)
2. Might not get prompt security updates of dependent lib code
Posted Jul 7, 2011 20:18 UTC (Thu)
by jengelh (guest, #33263)
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Posted Jul 8, 2011 6:20 UTC (Fri)
by roblucid (guest, #48964)
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Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:47 UTC (Thu)
by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
[Link] (3 responses)
Why no Bundled Libraries on the Fedora site
Posted Jul 7, 2011 20:43 UTC (Thu)
by Frej (guest, #4165)
[Link] (2 responses)
Sometimes the distro model puts a big barrier in between the developer and user, which isn't particularly helpful.
Posted Jul 11, 2011 20:56 UTC (Mon)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
My distribution scales pretty well for application updates, much better than the average upstream. And it doesn't need everything to be updated in one go.
I haven't used other distros for a while, so all I can swear to is Debian has none of these problems, but I sure had the impression the other folks had made big strides in the last decade.
Posted Jul 17, 2011 12:21 UTC (Sun)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link]
And there are things like the Open Build Service and PPA's which do allow you to have a component of your system updated.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 15:25 UTC (Thu)
by davide.del.vento (guest, #59196)
[Link] (6 responses)
Moreover, the forceful "save as" in a download directory (as opposed to /tmp) for all other "documents" is a deal breaker. With firefox, I can "open" any annoying docx file I need (i.e. it's automatically downloaded in /tmp and then opened with LibreOffice, then automatically deleted when /tmp is scrubbed). With Chrome/Chromium, I have to:
1) "save as"
Score: 4-1 for firefox, deal breaker for me. I do have Chrome installed, but I barely use it because of this (and because of lacking NoScript)
Posted Jul 7, 2011 15:42 UTC (Thu)
by pj (subscriber, #4506)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 8, 2011 7:53 UTC (Fri)
by jond (subscriber, #37669)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 12, 2011 17:09 UTC (Tue)
by martine (guest, #59979)
[Link]
You can adjust your system's default download directory by editing ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs or by setting the appropriate environment variable, no need to symlink.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:47 UTC (Thu)
by ptman (subscriber, #57271)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 9, 2011 7:17 UTC (Sat)
by nteon (subscriber, #53899)
[Link]
Posted Jul 8, 2011 11:03 UTC (Fri)
by union (guest, #36393)
[Link]
Wrench->Preferences->Under the hood->Downloads->
also there is checkbox "Ask where to save each file before downloading"
Also you can clear AutoOpen settings.
As for inbuild PDF:
go to about:plugins ,and disable Chrome PDF Viewer
or just use save as on pdf's.
Misc:
Posted Jul 7, 2011 15:26 UTC (Thu)
by fb (guest, #53265)
[Link] (7 responses)
The one extension I missed in Chrome/Chromium is "HTTPS Everywhere".
Being able to type in the address bar and not have everything sent to Google is another important +1 for Firefox.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 15:53 UTC (Thu)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (4 responses)
Turn that option off then? Assuming it's even on by default.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:30 UTC (Thu)
by cowsandmilk (guest, #55475)
[Link]
Posted Jul 7, 2011 17:09 UTC (Thu)
by fb (guest, #53265)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 11, 2011 8:56 UTC (Mon)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link]
Posted Jul 12, 2011 15:21 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link]
Fair enough I guess. I've always used keyword search and hence have never had a use for a separate search box personally, so I've never really noticed the distinction.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 18:34 UTC (Thu)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted Jul 9, 2011 6:23 UTC (Sat)
by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790)
[Link]
chrome://net-internals
Go to the HSTS tab, you can manually force a domain to HTTPS-only there.
It's perhaps abusing the HTTP Strict Transport Security standard, but it works without any extensions needed.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 15:30 UTC (Thu)
by boklm (guest, #34568)
[Link]
Using Chromium 11.0.696.68 on Mageia, I have no problem opening PDF files with evince.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 15:47 UTC (Thu)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (6 responses)
I have been a fervent Chromium user for more about a year and a half. The main reason why I did the switch was that Chromium felt snappier and sleeker to me. Chromium quickly became my main browser, but Firefox has never left the place: my wife prefers it.
Since FF 4 (and now 5), I find myself leaning back to Firefox. Not for the plugins -I no longer install anything besides dictionaries-, but for the same reasons that drove me to Chromium: nowadays FF feels faster and sleeker.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:56 UTC (Thu)
by sml (guest, #75391)
[Link] (5 responses)
In the end I switched back too. Firefox 4 certainly isn't as fast as Chromium - especially opening a lot of tabs - but it's close. I also ran into some annoying bugs around password management and window focus. e.g.
For me the main benefit of Firefox is the flexibility; largely afforded by plugins. As many mentioned, NoScript is a major omission. It's All Text is another. And the Chromium UI simply can't be rearranged the way Firefox's can.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 7:46 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (3 responses)
This is funny. I only use Firefox nowadays when I need to open lots of tabs because Chrome is just way too slow for this. Perhaps we have different definitions of "many"? 500 tabs can be opened in Firefox in about 3-5 minutes while Chrome takes at least 15...
Posted Jul 8, 2011 7:57 UTC (Fri)
by jond (subscriber, #37669)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 11, 2011 8:45 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
You assume I open 500 tabs to then browse in all of them... but this is only partially true. When you have some script which processes data from websites in some way and you want to test the result you naturally need to open all these sites in tabs: lots of sites don't like to live in frames. You open them, briefly look on each page (only stopping when you script did something wrong) and close them. With Firefox it's feasible to process 500 sites in batch, with Chrome 100 is the practical maximum. No, this is not something I do every day, but I do that from time to time... and that's the reason I keep Firefox around: it's just so much faster to do that with Firefox.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 15:09 UTC (Fri)
by southey (guest, #9466)
[Link]
Sure I miss the speed, but as Tom's hardware' recent article 'Web Browser Grand Prix 5: Opera 11.50, Firefox 5, And Chrome 12 it is not as bad as before.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:07 UTC (Thu)
by Thue (guest, #14277)
[Link] (1 responses)
-run plugins in separate sandboxed processes
One easy benefit of this is that, unlike Firefox, one tab running amok will not stall the entire browser. This is the greatest benefit of using Chromium for me.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 18:34 UTC (Thu)
by tetromino (guest, #33846)
[Link]
In other words, for Chromium, running tabs in individual processes is a matter of necessity (otherwise Chromium would have been unusable due to frequent crashes), while for Firefox, tab process isolation is more of a "might be nice to have in the distant future" feature.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:15 UTC (Thu)
by merge (subscriber, #65339)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 10, 2011 21:34 UTC (Sun)
by bboissin (subscriber, #29506)
[Link] (1 responses)
The distinction is that Mozilla publishes the API (and maybe sample code for the server).
Posted Jul 15, 2011 21:19 UTC (Fri)
by csenger (guest, #65002)
[Link]
..Carsten
Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:52 UTC (Thu)
by Simetrical (guest, #53439)
[Link] (1 responses)
I wrote a while ago on why I use Chrome instead of Firefox, when I was chatting with a Mozilla dev about it. Some of my reasons aren't really applicable to other people, but personally I prefer Chrome currently. The killer reasons for me right now are
Firefox has some nice features too, and they do plan to fix those two issues, so I might well switch back in the future. I think the real conclusion here is it's awesome we now have two great open-source browsers.
(I use Chrome instead of Chromium because I'm not concerned about the small amount of proprietary code relative to the size of the browser, compared to the benefits of greater testing and faster updates.)
Posted Jul 7, 2011 17:00 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
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Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:58 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (20 responses)
I really like Chrome/Chromium, but I'm sticking with Firefox for now. The two reasons may seem trivial, but are incredibly important to my productivity:
Posted Jul 7, 2011 17:03 UTC (Thu)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (16 responses)
Doesn't it? I'd swear I do that. Maybe there's a setting - or maybe I trained myself out of that habit subconsciously and haven't noticed. I'll try to remember to check when I get home...
Posted Jul 7, 2011 17:26 UTC (Thu)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (15 responses)
I actually like ignoring middle-spank on the page. Too often have I been burned by trying to paste text into an edit area and getting yanked to randomland instead.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 18:14 UTC (Thu)
by ccurtis (guest, #49713)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Jul 8, 2011 14:35 UTC (Fri)
by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497)
[Link] (2 responses)
This may not work if the form was created dynamically with Javascript some time after the page itself was loaded. I'm looking at you, Facebook.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 14:58 UTC (Fri)
by ccurtis (guest, #49713)
[Link] (1 responses)
Just to be clear, what I'm testing is hitting <tab> from here so that the focus is on the "Preview Comment" button, and then hitting <backspace>. It was very much a "burn me once" type event so I hadn't tried it again. And because of sites like FB I probably still won't. 8-/
Posted Jul 12, 2011 17:11 UTC (Tue)
by martine (guest, #59979)
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Posted Jul 11, 2011 9:06 UTC (Mon)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link] (1 responses)
Or you want to erase the last word and you hit CTRL+W. Ow, ow, ow!
Posted Jul 12, 2011 15:16 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link]
Ctrl-Shift-T is your friend (and works in at least Chrome/Chromium, Firefox, Opera).
Posted Jul 7, 2011 18:31 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (8 responses)
Ah, OK. So now I'm down to one reason: The ability to run an external editor on a textarea...
Posted Jul 8, 2011 0:32 UTC (Fri)
by galah (guest, #52673)
[Link] (6 responses)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ljobjlafonikaii...
Posted Jul 8, 2011 1:00 UTC (Fri)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (5 responses)
I haven't looked closely at that. Although I do use emacs as my standard text editor, the whole "edit server" infrastructure needed to get it working looks clumsy and fragile.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 1:58 UTC (Fri)
by njs (subscriber, #40338)
[Link] (1 responses)
I use this trick, so any time I need an emacs I instead get a frame attached to the great mother emacs process, which is transparently spawned on demand if it isn't already running: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient#toc2
When I delete the frame (which I have bound to C-x C-c), then the frame goes away and the emacsclient process returns. (There's still some message about using "C-c #" to dismiss the buffer, but I never do and it works fine.)
I've been running this way for a few months now, and so far it's all been smooth.
This thread reminds me that now that this is working, I should reconsider installing It's all Text! I never did before because the emacs startup overhead was too annoying :-)
Posted Jul 8, 2011 15:09 UTC (Fri)
by alex (subscriber, #1355)
[Link]
Posted Jul 8, 2011 15:06 UTC (Fri)
by alex (subscriber, #1355)
[Link] (2 responses)
The choice to use and edit-server is one that's forced on us by Chrome's security model. However (and I may be biased :-) I find it pretty reliable. I have it set-up to load whenever my emacs is in daemon mode which is the general purpose emacs session I use for everything from editing config files to textareas.
About the only thing it's missing is incremental update support. I've had a couple of run-ups at it but I'm not sure if I've been triggering bugs in emacs or my elisp-fu is lacking. Patches are of course welcome!
Posted Jul 8, 2011 18:21 UTC (Fri)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
The choice to use an edit-server is one that's forced on us by Chrome's security model.
Yep, I'm aware of that. :( It's too bad. I suspect I will remain on Firefox indefinitely for that reason.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 20:13 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jul 11, 2011 16:26 UTC (Mon)
by docwhat (guest, #40373)
[Link]
I don't have an ETA, in part, because work is eating my brain....but I'm working on it!
Feel free to join in, give suggestions, etc. here: https://github.com/docwhat/iated
Posted Jul 7, 2011 17:33 UTC (Thu)
by leiz (guest, #46265)
[Link]
I actually dislike middle clicking the content area to navigate. If my aim is off and I miss the text box, I end up navigating instead of pasting.
Posted Jul 16, 2011 4:57 UTC (Sat)
by lacostej (guest, #2760)
[Link] (1 responses)
works for me. Using 14.0.822.0 (Developer Build 92464 Linux) Ubuntu 10.10
Posted Jul 16, 2011 5:01 UTC (Sat)
by lacostej (guest, #2760)
[Link]
Posted Jul 7, 2011 17:23 UTC (Thu)
by kugel (subscriber, #70540)
[Link] (5 responses)
a) Speed Dial, which I use solely to map my most favorite sites to CTRL+[1-9]
BUt I also feel I'm very effective at browsing with my setup (for my needs that is) and thus see no need to change.
Posted Jul 10, 2011 15:15 UTC (Sun)
by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790)
[Link] (3 responses)
Then just below that, click the 'Manage exceptions' and you're not playing with the whitelist. :)
Posted Jul 10, 2011 15:36 UTC (Sun)
by kugel (subscriber, #70540)
[Link] (2 responses)
But I don't want to go through all the dialogs just for this. I like a toolbar button or context menu to quickly add some page to the whitelist.
Posted Jul 10, 2011 20:15 UTC (Sun)
by dtlin (subscriber, #36537)
[Link]
(One of the benefits of having Preferences work like any other HTML app rather than a bunch of native dialogs.)
Posted Jul 19, 2011 5:08 UTC (Tue)
by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790)
[Link]
Posted Jul 12, 2011 3:00 UTC (Tue)
by PlaguedByPenguins (subscriber, #3577)
[Link]
Posted Jul 7, 2011 18:52 UTC (Thu)
by felipec (guest, #75494)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 7, 2011 19:06 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link]
Posted Jul 7, 2011 20:23 UTC (Thu)
by dashesy (guest, #74652)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 8, 2011 0:00 UTC (Fri)
by sonnyrao (subscriber, #11351)
[Link]
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10028067-16.html
Posted Jul 8, 2011 8:03 UTC (Fri)
by jond (subscriber, #37669)
[Link]
Posted Jul 7, 2011 22:21 UTC (Thu)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link] (2 responses)
Besides the many things that others have mentioned, I also like Chromium's task manager. I tend to have lots of tabs open, and it's really nice to be able to see which tab is slowing down the computer. I like the process-per-tab model as well.
Posted Jul 7, 2011 23:03 UTC (Thu)
by SEJeff (guest, #51588)
[Link] (1 responses)
Have you ever heard of these things called iPhones, iPads, or Google's Android? All of them run webkit-based browsers.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 0:10 UTC (Fri)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link]
Numbers vary depending on what sites you look at, but Wikipedia attempts to gather the numbers here:
Then look further down the page:
On top of that, mobile browsers do their own thing enough just to work on handheld devices, enough that they really need to be considered separately from the desktop browsers when developing.
Yes, WebKit is important, and is getting to the point of competing with Firefox for market share. And yes the mobile WebKit browsers are important. But the mobile WebKit browsers have relatively little impact on the total WebKit market share.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 7:30 UTC (Fri)
by brunock (guest, #76114)
[Link] (1 responses)
Voilà, you can now watch pdfs in Chromium.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 17:05 UTC (Fri)
by kfiles (guest, #11628)
[Link]
I think the editor's point is that he *doesn't* want to run the non-free Chrome.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 8:39 UTC (Fri)
by rilder (guest, #59804)
[Link] (9 responses)
1. Chromium used to store password in plain text in their sqlite database only on linux. Not sure if it has changed now.
2. I use following addons which are not in browsers other than firefox:
3. I faced issues with chromium wrt fonts, (since I don't use any DE as such, I use xmonad), strange xft rendering among other things.
4. Another important thing -- chromium doesn't have equivalent of about:config for firefox. Don't expect everyone to jump through hoops of menus to do X task.
5. Firefox -- fix some priority bugs -- like 78414 which is related to flash stealing the focus and keeping it forever. Quite irritating.
6. Firefox seems to be improving a lot. Recently fixed a memory leak. about:memory is nice too. Copious documentation on internal Gecko/XUL APIs and other internals.
7. Regarding distribution, Arch packages chromium for both 32 and 64 bit (and also with codecs not present in chromium usually). Firefox is being packaged after built with PGO.
8. Coming to the issue of chrome bundling, it is *very* irritating. To cite an example, if I decide to use google chrome on my linux box, I have to install very old versions of libjpeg/libpng (one of them) just for chrome, whereas for chromium packaged by Arch it is built with latest libs, which brings me to
9. Build time of chromium -- since a lot of libs are bundled, the build time is quite high, quite taxing in memory and disk space (yeah, disk space). Firefox (non PGO) build is quite long too but no where close to that of chromium.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 16:29 UTC (Fri)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (2 responses)
> Following things (directed at both firefox and chrome/chromium developers):
You could edit the formfiller plugin to store with a .gpg extension and have $EDITOR auto-encrypt it when opened/saved.
> 2. I use following addons which are not in browsers other than firefox:
uzbl has vim-inspired browsing bindings by default.
> b. NoScript -- again quite essential
There's the per-site-settings script which can trigger uzbl commands when a site is browsed to (setting a local UA, disabling images, plugins, scripts, local bindings, whatever).
> If it wasn't for a.) I would have used Chromium or Opera or some webkit browser.
uzbl is webkit-based :) .
> 3. I faced issues with chromium wrt fonts, (since I don't use any DE as such, I use xmonad), strange xft rendering among other things.
Haven't noticed anything with uzbl here.
> 4. Another important thing -- chromium doesn't have equivalent of about:config for firefox. Don't expect everyone to jump through hoops of menus to do X task.
$EDITOR ~/.config/uzbl/config
> 5. Firefox -- fix some priority bugs -- like 78414 which is related to flash stealing the focus and keeping it forever. Quite irritating.
I don't use flash; wouldn't know with uzbl.
> 6. Firefox seems to be improving a lot. Recently fixed a memory leak. about:memory is nice too. Copious documentation on internal Gecko/XUL APIs and other internals.
uzbl beats every X11 browser I've used (4 times faster than Chromium here).
> 7. Regarding distribution, Arch packages chromium for both 32 and 64 bit (and also with codecs not present in chromium usually). Firefox is being packaged after built with PGO.
uzbl is well-packaged in AUR IIRC (some of the main devs are Arch users).
> 8. Coming to the issue of chrome bundling, it is *very* irritating. To cite an example, if I decide to use google chrome on my linux box, I have to install very old versions of libjpeg/libpng (one of them) just for chrome, whereas for chromium packaged by Arch it is built with latest libs, which brings me to
uzbl-core is all of 4131 lines in the .c files. Not much room for bundling :) .
> 9. Build time of chromium -- since a lot of libs are bundled, the build time is quite high, quite taxing in memory and disk space (yeah, disk space). Firefox (non PGO) build is quite long too but no where close to that of chromium.
That's webkit...takes >90 minutes (Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz) and >4G of disk. If they'd just use a system webkit, that would be remedied.
Posted Jul 11, 2011 0:13 UTC (Mon)
by Tet (guest, #5433)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 11, 2011 0:17 UTC (Mon)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted Jul 8, 2011 18:31 UTC (Fri)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (4 responses)
how many other things like this are lurking around? and how do you figure out what they are and what they do?
about:config is both nice thing (in that it lets you change things easily) and a horrible thing (in that there is little, if any documentation on what the options mean, let alone what the different values for the options mean)
Posted Jul 8, 2011 19:28 UTC (Fri)
by sonnyrao (subscriber, #11351)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jul 8, 2011 20:10 UTC (Fri)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (2 responses)
I get: This url is invalid and cannot be loaded.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 20:37 UTC (Fri)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (1 responses)
it's got links to many different about: pages, but still no information on what these things are.
Posted Jul 12, 2011 19:13 UTC (Tue)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
A good idea!
Posted Jul 11, 2011 1:21 UTC (Mon)
by dtlin (subscriber, #36537)
[Link]
1. Chromium/Chrome will use GNOME Keyring or KWallet. It still uses an unencrypted SQLite database if neither is available.
2. I'm a former Vimperator user. I tried the Vimium extension over a year ago, it didn't work that well back then. It may be better now, but I've found that I can customize gleeBox to mostly do what I want.
3. Chromium/Chrome uses Harfbuzz. So does Firefox. Not sure where the difference may be.
4. There's not that many options. If you're telling somebody to change a specific switch, you can use a chrome://settings/... direct link. There's a few other things which can be only changed from about:flags or as a command-line parameter, but not much.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 11:57 UTC (Fri)
by neilm (guest, #28422)
[Link]
chrome://settings/content - and select 'Do not allow any site to run JavaScript'. A icon appears in the URL bar when a site tries to run a script, and you can add an exception if you want.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 13:22 UTC (Fri)
by arekm (guest, #4846)
[Link]
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=147 (sep 2008)
or ignoring some issues:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20785
The other thing I dislike is login/pass autocompletion. I would prefer opera way there I can choose which login/pass there is to be posted into form and I don't have to remember what was the login etc. Opera informs me that is has saved data for this and this form and I can use these or not. It also can remember few differents datasets for the same form.
Posted Jul 8, 2011 15:14 UTC (Fri)
by alex (subscriber, #1355)
[Link]
However I still have Firefox installed on all my systems. It's loaded with AdBlock/NoScript and defaults into private mode. If I'm ever not sure about a site I fire it up and browse away in that. I suppose the only thing missing is a "Open this link in ${THE_OTHER_BROWSER}" extension extension so my workflow is faster.
Posted Jul 9, 2011 6:14 UTC (Sat)
by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790)
[Link] (2 responses)
What's that about needing a NoScript extension now?
Posted Jul 14, 2011 5:32 UTC (Thu)
by Duncan (guest, #6647)
[Link] (1 responses)
Five years ago, even two, that was OK. But more and more sites are running scripts from half a dozen or more other sites, either for ads and tracing (which I want blocked) or as functional libraries (which I often want to run), and I often I found myself opening pages in firefox with noscript just to get the list of sites that the page /wanted/ to run scripts from, so I could use enter the ones I thought I could trust back in konqueror, without having to do view-source on the page and then on the scripts it called, to see what scripts /they/ called. (FWIW, there's another extension I use, JSView, that lists individual scripts and lets me view them if I have questions about whether I want to permit something or not. It also lets me view any called for CSS files if desired to.)
Of course I had my regular sites configured years ago, but browsing to other sites had gradually become a worse and worse hassle, trying to sort out which other sites they wanted scripts whitelisted from and entering those into the whitelist or blacklist manually, since I wasn't actually /on/ those sites, only the page from the site I was actually on wanted to run scripts from them.
So eventually I decided since I was having to open firefox to get the off-site scripting site list from noscript anyway, I might as well just switch and be done with it.
Meanwhile, another noscript feature is what it calls surrogate scripts. These are designed to substitute dummy procedures and variable values that do NOTHING other than make other scripts that would ordinarily rely on the blocked scripts happy. The first surrogate was for google-analytics, I believe, which a lot of people block because they don't like being tracked. But when other scripts started relying on it, it caused whole pages to fail, and surrogate scripts was the solution noscript provided. (There are some surrogates built-in, but as always, functionality is entirely configurable and users can add their own, or disable or modify the provided ones for that matter, if desired.) Greasemonkey or personal proxies could provide similar functionality, but you're not going to get it with simple script blocking, for sure.
So indeed, as Corbet stated, simple script blocking simply isn't the same, and an extension would have to go some major distance to replace these and other features noscript has builtin over its now seven years (since 2004, according to the copyright) of ongoing development.
With chrome/chromium gaining share as it is, there's certainly demand for such a real noscript replacing extension (or port of the firefox extension), but I'm not sure it's even possible on chromium, due to the security model and extension API.
(None of this is to say that I find the noscript homesite entirely unobjectionable, however, or believe every bit of the hyperbolic market-speak puffery thereon. The extension certainly has its value, to the point I switched browsers primarily for it, but its developer appears to be as skilled in hyperbolic marketing puffery as he is in coding. He obviously makes enough money off of donations, etc, to keep up the puffery, but as long as it works and he keeps his code straight (significantly, there was a feud with the adblock plus dev some time ago that taught both of them some lessons regarding user trust and abuse thereof, lessens I don't think will need repeated for either dev, but it's nice to know it got caught virtually immediately and had definite negative reenforcement discouraging it happening again, when it /did/ happen), and as long as it remains freedomware, I'm not going to complain about him making a bit of money off it, and will live with the hyperbolic marketing puffery on the site.)
Duncan
Posted Jul 19, 2011 5:13 UTC (Tue)
by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790)
[Link]
Chromium/Chrome does support GreaseMonkey add-on scripts natively, which can do the Surrogate scripting you mentioned. Hell, it can do much more in many ways, while still respecting the sandboxing. I use it to force-convince a menuing script on my job's website to treat my browser as an iPhone by force-setting and locking w/ a variable-watch the 'is this a webkit browser?' and 'is this IE?' to specific values so the drop-down menus work, for example.
Posted Jul 9, 2011 8:10 UTC (Sat)
by yoe (guest, #25743)
[Link]
Chromium /is/ faster. Much. I don't have any issues with opening PDF files, either; it downloads them, and when I click on the downloaded file, it opens the PDF reader that's configured through update-alternatives. No fluff. Chromium, as built on Debian, also understands mozilla plugins, so I have flash (and youtube).
The only thing I miss is kerberos authentication, which might take a while. But hey, that's not quite a commonly required feature, is it?
Posted Jul 10, 2011 6:21 UTC (Sun)
by gfranken (guest, #22822)
[Link] (4 responses)
The computer screen is too distant for my reading glasses, and too close for my distance glasses. There are many mildly "visually challenged" people like me (do a google search on "zoom text only chromium" if you're in doubt).
Of course, Chromium lacks this zoom text only feature. And as long as this lacks continues, I'll never use Chromium for the long haul.
Posted Jul 10, 2011 7:48 UTC (Sun)
by dtlin (subscriber, #36537)
[Link]
Posted Jul 14, 2011 8:24 UTC (Thu)
by gek (guest, #18143)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 15, 2011 8:39 UTC (Fri)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 15, 2011 9:49 UTC (Fri)
by gek (guest, #18143)
[Link]
Posted Jul 15, 2011 0:58 UTC (Fri)
by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
[Link]
For me the killer feature of Firefox is that the Mozilla organisation cares about the open web, and keeping it open. Cares about end users. Mozilla shone the light of openness and reinvigorated the web after the dark IE6 years.
I think google has demonstrated with Android that it will only support openness when it suites them financially. Their customers are ad buyers not us.
I don't doubt they would quickly pull Chromium closed if it seemed beneficial to the bottom line.
Is a few ms of faster rendering performance worth a closed web? Clearly google supports Flash since it is bundled with Chrome.
Posted Jul 18, 2011 17:58 UTC (Mon)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link]
So you'll be switching back to Firefox, then, Jon? :-)
Posted Jul 24, 2011 16:51 UTC (Sun)
by chrisf (guest, #77345)
[Link] (2 responses)
SRWare Iron: The browser of the future - based on the free Sourcecode "Chromium" - without any problems at privacy and security
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
Posted Jul 25, 2011 4:12 UTC (Mon)
by dtlin (subscriber, #36537)
[Link] (1 responses)
Is Iron a Scam? Yes
Posted Aug 1, 2011 15:30 UTC (Mon)
by chrisf (guest, #77345)
[Link]
I apologise.
A naive user, in search for privacy.
Lacking NoScript is a problem. Another important plugin is RequestPolicy. I fill the lack of RequestPolicy by having a personal proxy. That way the filtering functionality is independent of the browser I use. The proxy is written in JavaScript and runs on Node.JS. It is about 200 lines of code. The configuration (what website can ask pages from other servers, what headers can be sent) has grown to about 800 lines after using it for three months.
Here's a snippet of my configuration.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
var filterItems = [{
allowedHeaders: {
'authorization': null,
'content-length': null,
'content-type': null,
'range': null
},
matchRules: [{
url: { hostname: ".*" }
}]
}, {
allowed: true,
matchRules: [{
samehost: true
}, {
samedomain: true
}]
}, {
allowedHeaders: {
'cookie': null
},
matchRules: [{
url: { hostname: "lwn\\.net" }
}]
}
Basically that config is saying: only send a few headers ('host' is not configured: it allowed by default), allow requests to the same domain and allow sending cookies to lwn.net.
This system does not yet work for https and I do not think that's needed at the moment. And FireFox is still my main browser.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
requires a 64-bit machine?
That statement came from slide 10 of the Life of a Chromium developer presentation linked from chromium.org. I'll confess that I didn't build it myself.
requires a 64-bit machine?
requires a 64-bit machine?
requires a 64-bit machine?
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
Flash requires the Adobe plugin; if you're willing to run that, I don't see a whole lot of reason not to just run Chrome. PDF doesn't work for me with the F15 Chromium build; Ubuntu may have configured things differently somehow.
Flash and PDF
Flash and PDF
Flash and PDF
Flash and PDF
Flash and PDF
Tell that the mozilla folks. I keep getting annoyed when Thunderbird fails to open attachments when running in KDE without me providing the exact path of the binary to open with. (It doesn't even respect $PATH)
Flash and PDF
The F15 machine has a pretty vanilla setup; it's not like the wilderness that is the Rawhide box. xdg-open works just fine, but trying to view a PDF in Chromium just yields a black page with a "missing plugin" message. A certain amount of searching suggests that I'm not the only one to see this behavior, but answers seem to be scarce.
Flash and PDF
Flash and PDF
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
http://codesearch.google.com/codesearch#search/&exact...
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
bundling libraries
bundling libraries
bundling libraries
bundling libraries
o On maintenance update, N copies of shared library to update instead of 1,
on windows need signature based scanner to find all the dll, update misses like Secunia PSI
o Confusing responsibilities, every upstream is forked leading in general to a chaos of multiple flavours of a package
o Requiring upstream enhancements or distro policy on build to be re-integrated
More from Tom Callaway on Chromium and bundling in a SCALE talk, covered here on LWN: SCALE: Projects and distribution unfriendliness
bundling libraries
bundling libraries
bundling libraries
bundling libraries
opensuse.org/tumbleweed?
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
2) find the directory
3) manually open the file
4) clean-up the mess afterwards myself.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
----------------------
Download location
-------------------
-----
If NoScript or something similar ever comes along I will use it until then I guess I'll relly on flashblock and "famed" chrome sandbox.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=5897
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29513
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=37381
This is funny...
Firefox 4 certainly isn't as fast as Chromium - especially opening a lot of tabs - but it's close.
This is funny...
Try to look in your browser history...
I also went back to Firefox 4 from Chrome partly because I got tired of it asking to use KDE wallet everything I opened it. While I understand the some of the need, I do not consider that an viable solution. Although I may try chromium.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
-run individual tabs in separate sandboxed processes
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
Sync
Sync
Sync
http://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync.html
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
The inspection tool is indeed a nice feature; I forgot to mention that one.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
Just middle-click the icon to the left of the URL. That's almost as easy.
Like the poster below, I only knew about middle-clicking the "+" (New Tab) feature. Thanks.
I actually like ignoring middle-spank on the page. Too often have I been burned by trying to paste text into an edit area and getting yanked to randomland instead.
I can't say I've ever had that problem, but one thing along these lines that I dislike about Chromium is if you're typing an essay to fill out a far-too-long form and hit [backspace] when the focus is on, say, a link or help icon instead of a text input, it takes you back a page and conveniently forgets everything you typed in as well. If I recall correctly, when middle-clicking in the content area Firefox at least remembers the form data when you hit [Back].
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
(I like getting a text-mode emacs for doing things like typing commit messages, and that works with this too, you just pass -nw to emacsclient.)
emacsclient?
The edit-server
The edit-server
The edit-server
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
My two cents...
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
b) Cookie managing extension to implement whitelisting (the only equivalent I found stores cookies but deletes them on browser close, whereas "Cookie Monster" blocks them.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
it restores enough of the old galeon behaviour that I'm using chromium full time now.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
I spent a fair amount of time with both browsers, not just chromium, despite the fact that free software is clearly where the interest of LWN readers tends to be. What do you think I missed?
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
One day you will run Chromium and see this new *feature* that shows a website as you are typing in the URL bar, of course all redirected through Google.
If there was any good intention, Google should have contributed to FF rather than respin the wheel.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
and has an agreement through November of this year
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Note that all mobile browsers together are only 5.8% of the total.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#...
Turns out Android and iPhone together make up only a third of the mobile browsers, or 1.9% of all browsers.
libpdf.so
$ rpm2tar google-chrome-unstable_current_x86_64.rpm
and then copy libpdf.so from the tarball to /usr/lib/chromium-browser
libpdf.so
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
a. Pentadactyl -- very important and reason why I *use* firefox. I also recommend this addon to lwn-ers.
b. NoScript -- again quite essential
If it wasn't for a.) I would have used Chromium or Opera or some webkit browser.
Cold startup has also improved drastically.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
> 1. Chromium used to store password in plain text in their sqlite database only on linux. Not sure if it has changed now.
> a. Pentadactyl -- very important and reason why I *use* firefox. I also recommend this addon to lwn-ers.
> Cold startup has also improved drastically.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
Whitelisting or blacklisting JS is built in, though not as powerful as NoScript.
A basic NoScript is built in...
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
Use both!
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
And changing the default font size in Chromium is not a solution working for every website.
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
A Firefox user plays with Chromium
Thirst, thank you for your comment. Second, I didn`t know about this, but I must admit, I didn`t search for any comments on Iron.