A Mixed Review For Google Chrome On Linux

omlx contributes this link to LinuxCrunch's short review of Google Chrome on Linux, writing: "The summary of it is that although Google Chrome is in a beta stage, it is fast, stable, and has a simple, clean, and effective GUI design. On other side, Google Chrome has a small number of extensions, doesn't support RSS, lacks integration with KDE, and doesn't support complex scripts very well. Personally, I didn't succeed in using Flash Player on Google Chrome beta 1 (I am using OpenSUSE 11.2) and I wonder how the quality of Google Chrome OS will be, especially if it's based on Linux and Google Chrome."

UI responsiveness

[sopssa]

Speed

If you look for a fast web browser, Google Chrome is the answer to you. The start-up speed is amazing comparing to Firefox. The Google developers did a very well job in this regard. the reason behind its speed is that Google Chrome does not use a cross-platform framework unlike Firefox which uses XUL. Google Chrome in GUN/Linux uses GTK+ directly without any layer in between. It uses also a different GUI library for each operating system it supports.

While I dont myself use Chrome, I have to agree here. UI responsiveness in such things like a browser is REALLY important. I have asked firefox developers and users many times why the UI isn't more responsive, and the sum answer of that is XUL. I love Opera's UI responsiveness. I love Chrome's UI responsivess. But Firefox's and IE's is just shit. It's really something Mozilla should work with, because until it's on those twos level I wont be using Firefox. What is the real reason to use it then? Many people say its easily extensible. sure, XML like language probably is. But you could even try to optimize it. Convert it to byte or machine in run time, or something. Firefox is really lacking behind on this aspect and I'd really like to see them improve it.

But why are both Opera and Chrome better in UI responsiveness than Firefox, IE and other problems? Is it because they see the advantage on it, or is it really that hard? What could be done for it?

Flash not working

[avandesande]

I thought flash not working is a feature.

Flash works fine...

[baldbobbo]

on Ubuntu using GNOME. I've been using Chrome since Alpha, and once they had flash compatibility, I haven't used anything else. Super fast, occasionally crashes, but when it does, it's flash loading, and the browser doesn't shut down on you. Didn't RTFA, but he should have tried different distros. To say "It sucks on Linux" when you only use one distro is like saying "Ice cream sucks" when you only taste one flavor. You gotta try em all

Re:sigh

[pclminion]

"Don't criticize it, it's a beta." That's nonsense. The whole reason you release a beta is to get feedback.

As far as the KDE thing, though, I agree. Exactly what sort of "integration" with KDE was expected?

Fix how it handles tabs

[diamondsandrain]

Until Chrome fixes how it handles tabs I will never use it. I know it sounds like a minor quibble.... but it is practically unusable when you have more than a couple of tabs open. Firefox handles this the correct way by putting arrows at the ends of the tabs and allowing you to scroll across to the remaining tabs. Chrome handles this the wrong way by trying to squeeze all the tabs onto the window at the same time. It doesn't take very long before you get useless tab titles like "A...." and "D..." and you cannot tell which tab is which. I usually have at least 15 tabs open at any given time. This can swell to 30 or 40 at times. Of course, I gave up on Safari because when I tried it out there was no way to save the tabs so that they opened again when you restarted the browser. Another very simple thing that greatly affects my enjoyment of the browser. Maybe they have fixed that since.... I don't know.

Re:Flash not working

[GF678]

So not being able to view video on sites like YouTube seamlessly (ie. without requiring extensions/workarounds to view FLV files in a 3rd-party player) is a feature?

And do give me that shit about YouTube not having anything useful to watch. If so, you just aren't trying very hard.

Re:Not Chrome's Fault

[Ethanol-fueled]

Hell no, bro. I finally transitioned to an all-Linux household after the release of the ultra-mature, ultra-stable Ubuntu 9.10. It worked wonders right out of the box. The only gripe I have about 9.10 is the default desktop wallpaper which is colored like tubgirl's whale-spout.

My 7 year old Dell Latitude D600 [cnet.com] runs the compiz cube and with all the pretty window effects and dosen't even slow down until a skydome image or 3-d windows on cube rotate are added. All hardware is detected with the best drivers and there are no issues with hibernation. There's also no need for command-line boot options. It just works(tm).

Next up for Linux, media production software. What the fuck is up with Hydrogen and Ardour? Can't they get at least one real musician on their design staff?

Nothing but praise here

[lessgravity]

I have installed both Chrome and Chromium on about 15 machines and 3 flavors of Linux. In each case the UI responsiveness is amazing. Huge improvement over Firefox. So far everything has worked beautifully on each of these machines. No problems with Flash. I'm surprised that the link review complained about the lack of extensions. There are plenty of extensions. Kinda made the rest of the review look poorly researched.

sticky font size and bookmarks

[hogleg]

its working pretty good for me on ubuntu 9.10. I would like to see it remember the font size of the page next time it opened, like it does in firefox. As it is now, upon opening the page will default to whatever the default is. I miss the ability to do keywords to my bookmarks too. I would think this would be easy to fix. Chrome can only get better as it goes forward.

RSS in Chrome

[John Whitley]

It's worth noting that RSS support is an extension for Chrome [google.com], written by Google. It presents the usual RSS location bar icon, and is configurable:

The extension comes with 4 feed readers predefined (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines and My Yahoo) but also allows you to add any web-based feed reader of your choice to the list.

No RSS-as-bookmark folders support, but I don't miss that as I vastly prefer a dedicated (desktop or webapp) RSS reader.

Works great for me on Linux. OS X users will need to grab a dev channel build for extensions support; the usual disclaimers about unreleased code apply. The recent Mac Chrome release doesn't have extensions turned on yet.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure I see the problem here. You dont see the ad (CSS is blocked), advertiser gets their "page view" that they paid for. Unless you are still on dialup, this shouldnt impact load times significantly.

If this gets the hits for advertisers that prevents paywalls, while keeping you safe from the really annoying stuff, it sounds like a win-win to me. What am I missing?

Re:Distribute glibc then ...

[pclminion]

We briefly considered that, but decided it was unacceptable. The glibc binary is just too large. One of the things our customers consistently praised us for was that our .exe was under 1.5 megabytes, while the closest competing app was over 15 megabytes. glibc alone was equal to the size of the app. Slicing and dicing the code to the bare minimum wasn't acceptable either, because then it wasn't a stock library anymore and we would have had to put it through testing, and we were not interested in testing runtime libs. Not to mention that if we ever had to upgrade the library we'd have to do it all over again.

Actually, I briefly undertook a skunkworks effort to trim glibc down to the bare minimum. I gave up after just one evening when I discovered that simply calling printf() drags in almost the entire freaking library by reference. I was dumping linker dependency maps and it was clear that it would take MAJOR changes to make even MINOR effects on code size. The entire glibc codebase is so twisted and interdependent that I gave up in disgust. There's theory, then there's practice.

Anyway, somebody already pointed out that Chrome is BSD licensed, which I didn't know. In that case, your distro of choice should be building a compatible package for you. Patience!

Re:Nothing but praise here

[KlaasVaak]

Yes there is a problem if you are concerned about your privacy and yes big flash ads will slow down page loading no matter how fast your connection is.

Re:Flash not working

[westlake]

I thought flash not working is a feature.

To the geek.

To everyone else it is a show-stopper.

This rule applies to any program, add-on, plug-in, or extension that is considered an essntial download by almost every OSX and Windows user.

Re:Distribute glibc then ...

[Blakey Rat]

And BTW this is an advantage of Free software as you are automatically entitled to redistributing the library yourself.

An advantage of Free software is that it lets you, using an arcane and complex process, fix the problem caused by using Free software in the first place?

Wow.

Re:sigh

[Xugumad]

Feedback is something you write to developers, not something you write in an article on your advertising supported website...

Re:sigh

[Xugumad]

Really?

If you developed something for months, released a version labelled as "beta" for testing only, and found a /. review of it, do you really think you'd feel this was a good forum to provide feedback?

Not to mention; it should be on a bug tracking system, so they can discuss it directly, flag requests for action or explain why they can't be done. This is likely to be lost and forgotten within a couple of weeks.

GTK

[Anonymous Coward]

The GTK integration is half assed.. how about making the tab shape follow the theme correctly for a start. Oh and my menubar picks up the wrong colour & the scrollbars are wrong. There are multiple other GTK issues. Firefox (at least v3) gets this stuff right, I will stick with that.