Chromium

[ZombiePete]

I tend to be an early adopter of new technology, particularly when it's free. But when Google's browser Chromium first appeared, I was hesitant. I am a big fan of Firefox. It was the first web browser I tried after years of using Internet Exploder and I did it with trepidation. After all, there was no way that a free piece of software could ever compare to what years of investment and development power that went into IE.

Of course I was dead wrong. Firefox quickly became my defacto browser, offering features and add-ons that IE would only begin to emulate years later. To this day I don't think that IE has gotten tabbed browsing or bookmarks right. It's only been recently as we were forced to use IE exclusively for a short period of time that I really came to appreciate just what Firefox has gotten right. You can't imagine the shock of going back to an internet unprotected by Adblock Plus and NoScript after years of using them.

So the idea of moving to Chromium, which is still in a technology preview stage on Linux, made me cringe a little. It doesn't have the add-on base that Firefox has, and it definitely hasn't been around the block like Firefox either. On the other hand, it is DAMN FAST. If there's one thing that Firefox has going against it, its memory management can be pretty awful. If you leave it running for a long period of time, it can end up eating all your processor resources. Chromium doesn't have this issue, and it loads up websites in no time at all. I downloaded Chromium the first day it came out on Windows, and while it was definitely immature, I couldn't believe the difference in speed.

Last night, I decided to give it a whirl and see how it looked in Ubuntu. I added the repositories to Synaptic, ran a quick update, and then ran the install command. As usual, it was a seamless process that required zero input from me (after the initial prep work; since this isn't an official release, it's not in the package manager yet). Of course my internet connection decided to be a pain in the butt and it took about five minutes to download 18MB.

Now, supposedly with some quick fixes this version of Chromium was supposed to support Flash on Linux. I made the changes outlined but it didn't work. I tried doing them again and still nothing. I don't know if anyone else had that issue, but I never was able to get Flash working.

Other than that, though, the browser worked flawlessly. I have to admit, the speed difference is less noticeable on my up-and-down connection, but I could still feel the difference. The other difference I noticed right off the bat were the incessant ads all over every webpage I browsed. Quickly the missing add-ons from Firefox outweighed any perceived speed improvements.

Chromium is a fast browser, no doubt about it. But right now, in my opinion, that's all it has going for it. As a user, I find it less intuitive than Firefox is just general use. I don't like how it immediately opens a bunch of tabs and I couldn't quickly find a way to change that function. There also didn't seem to be a lot of options in general. Now, this is a tech preview so it's not ready for primetime yet, and I understand that. These are just my initial impressions.

In any case, it looks like I'll be sticking to Firefox for now. What can I say, in the end, I'm sentimental.