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 Channel Futures

Open Source


Testing Chromium on Ubuntu

  • Written by Christopher Tozzi
  • January 12, 2010

I’ve read a lot about Google’s Chrome browser in the blogosphere, but have yet to see it being used in the wild. Given this observation, and my increasingly strained relationship with Firefox, I decided to give Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based, another try.  Here’s what I found.

I’ve been a Firefox fan for a while, and haven’t seriously used any other browser since Firefox 2 was released.  Unfortunately, my new netbook seems to be afflicted by this super-annoying bug, which causes the Firefox “Awesome Bar” not to work after waking my computer up.

I suspend this machine a lot, and that bug provided good inspiration for me to test out some Firefox alternatives, starting with Chromium.  I easily installed the browser from Ubuntu’s PPA and was off to the races.

Cool things about Chromium

I played around with Chromium early last summer, but it was far too raw at that point to be a serious contender for production use.  That’s all changed, and there are a number of aspects of Chromium that I found impressive.

For starters, it seems quite a bit speedier than Firefox 3.5, especially on javascript-heavy websites–which is not surprising, since many of Google’s most profitable services, like Gmail, depend heavily on javascript, providing a strong incentive for Google to ensure those applications are maximally responsive.  I didn’t run any benchmarks myself, but most of those I read, such as this one, reported similar findings on Chromium’s speed.

Chromium also offers a slew of features that aren’t available in Firefox by default.  These include built-in developer tools that provide functionality similar to that of the Firebug extension for Firefox, as well as a utility like Mozilla Prism that creates stand-alone Web applications.

I also like Chromium’s efficient use of screen space.  There’s no toolbar on top and no status bar on the bottom, maximizing the number of pixels available for web content.  This attentiveness to screen real estate is important on my netbook, which is limited to 1024×600 resolution.

Perhaps the most impressive feature, at least to me, was Chromium’s built-in support for flash and similar content.  There’s no need to install Adobe’s plugin, which is handy.  Disregard this.  Chromium currently does flash the same way as Firefox, via an independent plugin.

Uncool things about Chromium

Of course, with the good always comes some bad, and Chromium is not perfect.  Besides a few serious bugs that still need to be worked out (the code is still beta), there are some aspects of the browser that I seriously dislike.

Above all, Chromium by default uses its own theme, which is pretty ugly, in my opinion:

Chromium

This setting can be changed to use the Gnome theme instead, but the neon blue by default seems like a poor choice, especially against Ubuntu’s earth tones.

I’m also not a fan of Chromium’s integration of the search box within the address bar. In Firefox, I like that these two elements are separate. Combining them makes it harder to separate search suggestions from entries for previously visited websites.

Finally, while Chromium comes with a lot of cool features, as discussed a few paragraphs above, I’m not sure I like that these are installed by default.  What happened to the simple, bloat-free browser that renders web pages without doing anything else?

Firefox is relatively plain out-of-the-box, and extra functionality–including pretty much everything that Chromium offers by default–can be achieved via extensions.

Chromium also allows extensions, but it comes with many more features built-in than Firefox has.  I’m not sure this is the best approach; it seems to me that it might be a better idea to make stuff like the developer tools and Prism-esque features an optional add-on, rather than an integrated component that will waste system resources for users who aren’t interested in such functionality.

That said, Chromium is not exactly a resource hog–it’s comparable to Firefox in terms of resource use, in my experience–and the few extra kilobytes of memory being sucked up by the developer-tools feature aren’t going to break the RAM bank on any modern computer.  All the same, bloat is the last thing the modern IT world needs more of, and developers should work hard to avoid unnecessary functionality.

All in all, Chromium is a very solid web browser, and I will probably stick with it for the time being as long as I don’t experience any major bugs. I’m not going to say Ubuntu should ditch Firefox and install Chromium by default, but Google’s browser is definitely worth checking out for those who have grown tired of the Mozilla world.

Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Mobility Open Source

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16 comments

  1. Avatar lessgravity January 12, 2010 @ 7:57 pm
    Reply

    I’m a huge Chromium fan. The speed increase is so amazing that I haven’t missed Firefox at all. The extensions and themes are great. The only complaints I have heard are that Chromium doesn’t run as well in KDE as Gnome.

  2. Avatar Leo January 12, 2010 @ 8:26 pm
    Reply

    I run it in KDE and I love it. My wife runs it in KDE and loves it. It became our main browser in a snap! I love its clean and simple user interface, it actually looks pretty native in KDE, and it runs pretty well and really snappy, even in our netbook. I added the main pages we visit in the bookmarks bar very easily and I am all set!

    Of course this is based on webkit, in turn based on KHTML, so it has a lot of KDE in it 🙂

  3. Avatar Steve Love January 12, 2010 @ 8:50 pm
    Reply

    Changing the neon blue is pretty easy even if you don’t use the Gnome theme. Commenter lessgravity alludes to the installable themes but they aren’t mentioned in your article, which makes me think maybe you aren’t aware of them. Note there are two types: Artist Themes, and Themes by Google.

  4. Avatar adam January 12, 2010 @ 10:05 pm
    Reply

    The firefox bug you talk about can be solved (worked around) with a simple minimize then restore of the window. The problem is with the change of focus from gnome-screensaver back to firefox. I find that if I simply minimize firefox before walking away or putting to sleep that upon waking firefox works as before.

  5. Avatar Christopher Tozzi January 12, 2010 @ 11:35 pm
    Reply

    Steve: thanks for pointing out the themes. I did read about them but haven’t tried them myself yet. I actually just prefer the standard gtk+ theme so that Chrome fits in with everything else.

    adam: thanks for the tip on that bug. If I end up going back to Firefox I’ll keep it in mind. Hopefully they’ll fix the issue soon.

  6. Avatar Daniel Añez Scott January 13, 2010 @ 2:14 am
    Reply

    I’ve been using chrome/ium for the last months too. But i wanted to point out that there’s a nice extension that makes firefox use screen space more efficiently. It’s called meerkat http://banshee-project.org/~abock/meerkat/

  7. Avatar Pat January 13, 2010 @ 3:28 am
    Reply

    If you haven’t tried Opera for Linux lately, I’d strongly recommend the latest version — 10.10 — which I’m using on Ubuntu.

    Opera for Linux used to be the Norwegian-based browser’s worst — remember the miserable fonts — but no more.

    In my opinion Opera for Ubuntu is now better than Opera for Mac or Windows. On my old PC it’s much faster than Opera 9.x, it looks terrific and the fonts are as good as any you’ll find anywhere.

    Opera has often provided new features years ahead of better-known browsers. The innovation gap has narrowed with Chrome/Chromium and Firefox, but to my knowledge Opera is still ahead in offering great features such as “fit to width,” a button that ensures you’ll never have to scroll right to read a web page — no matter how big you make the text.

  8. Avatar darkhole January 13, 2010 @ 4:29 am
    Reply

    “Perhaps the most impressive feature, at least to me, was Chromium’s built-in support for flash and similar content. There’s no need to install Adobe’s plugin, which is handy.”

    Come on.. Chrome/Chromium just use the same dir of Mozilla Firefox for plugins (/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/). There is no magic… The Flash plugin is NOT embedded in Chrome/Chromium

  9. Avatar Links 13/1/2010: SimplyMEPIS 8.0.15, Facebook Gives Apache $ January 13, 2010 @ 9:26 am
    Reply

    […] Testing Chromium on Ubuntu I’ve read a lot about Google’s Chrome browser in the blogosphere, but have yet to see it being used in the wild. Given this observation, and my increasingly strained relationship with Firefox, I decided to give Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based, another try. Here’s what I found. […]

  10. Avatar ricegf January 13, 2010 @ 10:38 am
    Reply

    I’ve tried both, and agree Chromium feels “lighter” and “faster” than Firefox, but also clashes with the Ubuntu default themes (and none of the themes for Chromium really “fit” with Ubuntu – I tried them all).

    By the way, on my netbook, I use F11 with Firefox to browse full-screen (NO controls or window borders AT ALL). Bump the cursor against the top of the screen to change tabs, enter a URL, go back or reload. F11 again to see the status bar or the OS widgets. It’s the only way to browse on a netbook, IMHO.

    I’m staying with Firefox for now, but with one eye on Chromium. Choice is good! 😀

  11. Avatar Techs Palace January 13, 2010 @ 2:06 pm
    Reply

    Not to forget each tab and also ”extentions” runs on seperate process.

    {
    (Not Only Ubuntu Blog)
    http://techspalace.blogspot.com
    }

  12. Avatar Christopher Tozzi January 13, 2010 @ 3:02 pm
    Reply

    darkhole: you’re right about the flash plugin. Thanks for catching that. I had purged the flashplugin-nonfree package but still had flash in Chromium, so I thought it was doing it on its own. Apparently Adobe’s flash had also been installed with a second package, however, and that’s what provided the codec for Chromium. I’ll update the post.

  13. Avatar 1916home.net January 13, 2010 @ 3:16 pm
    Reply

    I second a nod for Opera. I jump between all three lately… FF, Opera and Chrome. Im not happy with FF speed, but it does everything I need it to do. Opera is fast and shows webpages correctly, but java doesnt work well for me in Opera. While Chrome is super fast,flash in Chrome doesnt work on half of my computers. It somehow reverts to an older version of flash, making simple webpages like Youtube unusable. Java appears to work on all computers in Chrome, but going to a site like Pogo.com and java really doesnt work. I dont go there often, but when I help older computer users switch from Windows to Ubuntu, game sites that use java are a must! So I need the browser to just work.

  14. Avatar Leo January 13, 2010 @ 3:32 pm
    Reply

    Yes, I think that’s the bottom-line. Choice is good. I have Opera, Konqueror, Firefox and Chrome (the default browser now) installed, for the occasional stupid page that works in one and not in another.

    In that regard, we should all be grateful to the FF community for bringing choice a few years back, at a time when most web pages were written “for IE”. The sole presence of Firefox helped make the web a better place, and we can enjoy that today with any browser (including the great FF). Cheers!

  15. Avatar slumbergod January 13, 2010 @ 4:56 pm
    Reply

    Without NoScript and more ability to customise the interface, I’ll stick with Firefox. I don’t notice that Chrome is all that much faster than Firefox for general surfing…just the start up is appreciably faster.

  16. Avatar Antonio Roberts January 13, 2010 @ 7:29 pm
    Reply

    I don’t know why people are afraid of bloating or adding lots of features to software. It’s only a bad thing if it reduces the performance of the software. In this case, even at a beta stage it has lots of features and still runs well.

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