Chromium alpha for Linux

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/hands-on-google-chromium-browser-alpha-for-linux.ars

by donaq • 17 years ago

44 18 17 years ago

edmccaffrey2• 17 years ago

I understand the organizational differences between Chromium and Chrome--where Chromium is the open source basis of Chrome--but I cannot find any listing of the functional differences between them. I tried Chromium on Linux, but its early state meant that anything different could easily be not implemented.

dflock2• 17 years ago

'Chrome' is the Google branded officially released version of 'Chromium' - which, as you pointed out, is the open source base on which 'Chrome' built. There is currently no 'Chrome' release for Linux, only nightly builds of 'Chromium' - which can be had here, if you're using Ubuntu:

http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu

edmccaffrey2• 17 years ago

I understand that; what I haven't found is the actual difference between the two. Are there any functional differences between Chrome and Chromium (assume Windows version, since I'm not referring to things missing in an incomplete port), or is it only a branding thing so that the projects that fork and extend it don't use something with Google's brand?

donaq• 17 years ago

I just installed it and I tried this on it as well as Firefox:

http://grad.icmc.usp.br/~felipc/processing_js/chaostheory.ht...

I must say that the difference in speed is impressive, even though the score did not display. Still, not too shabby for an alpha!

thristian• 17 years ago

Apparently native support for x86_64 is not in the foreseeable future:

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/64-bit-s...

Guess I'll be sticking with Firefox for a while yet (or Opera, or Epiphany-webkit, or Midori, or...)

trezor2• 17 years ago

I'm running 32-bit Firefox in Windows Server 2008 x64 and I have no issues with this what so ever. It's stable, working and you shouldn't really need more than 4GB of memory for a web-browser anyway.

Compared to the minefield of bugs that is Minefield (64-bit FF builds), coupled with lousy plug-in support, the 32-bit version is a by far superior option.

I'm not saying you have to run Chrome, as I'm kinda fed up with the hype, but why would you make lack of 64-bit support a show-stopper for something like a web-browser? For a DB-server needing massive amounts of RAM I could see the point, but for a web-browser?

deutronium• 17 years ago

I'd agree with you that yes there isn't a great advantage of a 64 bit web browser. But 64 bit FF + the 64 bit Flash plugin seems pretty stable for me at the moment, maybe theres a slight advantage if you play HD video through the webbrowser.

davidw3• 17 years ago

I got Chromium from the .deb that's available, and it made me install the msfttcore font package in order to function, which screwed up my fonts. My guess is that there's a way to make that not happen, but I don't have time to dig around for it right now. Other than that, it seems like a pretty nice browser.

mattyb3• 17 years ago

If you use aptitude/APT (I haven't looked at the deb in dpkg), the chromium-browser package doesn't install msttcorefonts/ttf-mscorefonts-installer. chromium-testsuite depends on them, so you might not want to install that.

davidw3• 17 years ago

Cool - what sources.list are you using? Maybe that was the problem.

mattyb3• 17 years ago

I'm using it right now. It's quite a bit faster than FF 3.5b4 on my machine. Options aren't implemented, yet it imported all of my Firefox stuff without a hitch (I've yet to see this work on Windows for me).

trezor2• 17 years ago

I'm using it right now because regular Firefox is dog slow on Linux, something you really notice on things like low-powered netbooks.

My main complaints so far are that there is no options screen at all and that font rendering is horrible: ugly and buggy. For instance, horrible is not shown in italics here and I'm pretty sure text looked better on a C64 running GeOS than they do in Chromium on Linux.

I can understand the lack of plugin and extension-support so far, it still being in an alpha state, but I kinda miss adblock plus. Using bfilter trough a proxy just doesn't do a equally good job.

While I realize it's not a priority for an alpha release the documentation is AFAIK non-existant. I had to google around and search developer mailing lists to find out how to set a proxy at all.

It's speedy compared to Firefox, but it clearly shows it needs a lot of work before it is something I would recommend to people I know.

ori_b2• 17 years ago

It's disappointing that they seem to be using their own build of WebKit, instead of the officially supported WebKitGtk port that exists in Apple's repository. This means that the development effort is split, and that bugs in one port won't be fixed in the other.

Google could have contributed to the entire Linux desktop ecosystem by joining forces with the WebKitGtk team, but instead they went their own way. They would have benefitted as well, having a mostly-stable and mostly-complete base to start from, instead of having all these rendering bugs and complaints about fitting GTK into WebKit.

truebosko• 17 years ago

It's fast and slick at the moment but can only be used as a secondary browser. If you're looking for a slight speed improvement over Firefox 3.0, get the Firefox 3.5 beta (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html) .. I've been using it as my primary browser on Ubuntu for about a month and have had no real issues.

Chromium alpha for Linux

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