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A Mixed Review For Google Chrome On Linux 223

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."
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A Mixed Review For Google Chrome On Linux

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  • UI responsiveness (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sopssa ( 1498795 ) * <sopssa@email.com> on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @04:54PM (#30586374) Journal

    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?

    • by lessgravity ( 314124 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:23PM (#30586742)

      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.

      • by __aamnbm3774 ( 989827 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:31PM (#30586834)
        It not only has tons of extensions, (all the basics included, like Ad Blocking, Gmail Checker, etc) but has a fantastic way to search for them... on par with Mozillas plug-in search.

        I agree, if I even bothered to RTFA, I would have stopped reading at that point.
        • by eqisow ( 877574 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:41PM (#30586930) Homepage

          Last I checked (two months ago?) Chrome had no ad blockng to speak of. Sure, there's AdSweep and AdBlock+, but they just hide ads with CSS, where Firefox stops the ads from ever being downloaded. When I was using Chromium regularly I ended up using Privoxy for ad blocking.

          As I understood the situation at the time, this shortcoming was due to the functionality not being possible in Chrome. So, the browser from the company that sells ads has limited ad blocking functionality. Is anyone really surprised?

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by 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: (Score:3, Funny)

              by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

              To be fair, the lack of flash plugin (or so the summary says) is enough for me to endorse the browser.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by KlaasVaak ( 1613053 )
              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.
            • My only problem was I visited a site with Chrome in Windows with Adblock+. The ad still rendered, but was hidden. This slows down page rendering, but worse, there was malicious code that downloaded and tried opening a virus-infected PDF file.

              This was a drive-by ad when I was reading Ain't It Cool News. I went right back to Firefox.

              I like a lot of things about Chrome, but I need a good Adblock solution.

              Chromium is ocmpletely open-source, and there is a fork with a built-in Adblock solution called Iron, but i

            • by RLiegh ( 247921 )

              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.

              I'm on cable, and when I forget to use adblock I usually find that the ads take a very, very long time to load, often times preventing me from browsing the site entirely. Google analytics is one of the worst for that, imo.

            • People like myself with extremely limited bandwidth see the difference. When I load a page from wherever, that is loaded with adverts (often enough, flash powered) it might take a full minute to load a page. All that bandwidth wasted, just to read a few lines of text, that should load so fast that I don't actually SEE it loading.

              One way to stop all that trash loading is to use your HOSTS file, or some other proxy that filters out the advertising, since most of the advertising doesn't even come from the si

        • I know some people are going to come in with the defence "but the Firefox performance issues are due to certain extensions". This may be the case, but if extensions are such an important part of a given application, then it better know how to deal with those causing issues, by either sand boxing them or disabling them if they are detected to cause issues. I am not claiming that this is something easy to do, and it in fact it is probably hard, but the fact is you don't open the Pandora box and not expect it

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Gerzel ( 240421 ) *

        Indeed. I also have installed it on my machine and have had no troubles. Responsiveness is slightly better than firefox, though the difference isn't as great as when I boot into Windows on the same machine where I also have Chrome and Firefox.

        In the end Chrome has several good features for general browsing especially speed but lacks the extendability of Firefox. Firefox has more available features but is slower. Both are likely to improve.

      • by xeoron ( 639412 )
        I agree about the linux beta version. Hands done it is far faster for any website that uses javascript and flash compared to FF or Opera. My only 5 complaints are these:
        1. it happens often where a tab will crash from loading a page-- mostly happens on pages with javascript, and more so with many tabs open at the same website but different locations, and if one of the tabs fails for the site, all of them crash-- even the ones that were fully rendered
        2. bookmark managing and searching could be better
        3. I really d
        • I'm using the daily builds of chromium so I don't know how it differs from the beta but...

          3. I really dislike that I cannot associate a downloaded filetype to a program to launch (ex: can't click on a network music service playlist and have it launch/send it to the program. FF, IE, Konqueror, etc will let me do it, instead it merely downloads it to the download folder and I have to manually tell it to open the file)

          This annoyed me too. But it seems that when it's downloading you can click the arrow next to it and tell it to always open files of that type. Then it uses whatever programs you have associated.

          4. it would be nice to be able to see webpage titles better

          Under options you can choose to use the GTK+ Theme, that will show a normal title bar and the full webpage title.

          Overall still more work to do but the speed makes it hard to open another browser unless I just have to. I'm on

    • Re:UI responsiveness (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Hurricane78 ( 562437 ) <deleted&slashdot,org> on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:28PM (#30586798)

      I don’t know how many times I have recommended this simple and effective solution to the XUL problem:

      Just compile the damn stuff into something faster! Like a library, but a bit safer (sandboxed).
      Leave the XUL files where they are, monitor them with inotify or at specific events, and re-compile them if they were changed (e.g. by installing a extension. Do not accept pre-compiled stuff in an extension. That way you still get to see all the source.

      There, done. I don’t get what’s so hard about this. The whole parsing and error handling thing is already done. Just walk the tree with functions that replace the nodes with binary code or something alike. And get the dragon book if you haven’t already. :)

      • P.S.: That’s what I get for answering to a comment without reading more than the first paragraph. ^^

        P.P.S.: That’s what you get for forcing us to go “tl;dr”. ;)

        P.P.P.S.: *Imagines getting a +5 Funny anyway*

      • by mcrbids ( 148650 )

        I don't get what's so hard about this.

        And that's probably due to your lack of any meaningful information about the problem. Typically when there is a solution to the problem that seems simple and trivial, and the people involved are morons for not implementing it, it's because those implementation details are more significant than your understanding would allow.

        But here's a hint: simple problems are generally solved quickly. Complex problems are generally solved slowly. When you see reasonably bright people

      • Re:UI responsiveness (Score:5, Informative)

        by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Wednesday December 30, 2009 @05:47AM (#30591680)
        Just compile the damn stuff into something faster! Like a library, but a bit safer (sandboxed).

        It already does. On first boot XUL / JS is parsed into objects which are serialized as prototypes into XUL.mfl where mfl stands for Mozilla Fast Load. The next time the app starts it constructs the prototypes from the fast load file rather than the XML. The mfl file is regenerated when the XUL changes of course.

    • by Inda ( 580031 )
      I thought the same, after finally installing Chrome on Vista, after the billboard adverts finally got to me.

      The UI was blistering fast on Chrome and I thought WOW. After 10 minutes of use, I was not happy with the UI bugs (when zoomed, some links on some sites don't work), and the lack of UI customisation options.

      FF3 is still a more finished product.
      • by Rei ( 128717 )

        It's not just UI responsiveness -- Chrome has great Javascript performance. If only setting opacity through Javascript didn't occasionally break Chrome with an "Aw, Snap!" error...

        • by macshit ( 157376 )

          It's not just UI responsiveness -- Chrome has great Javascript performance. If only setting opacity through Javascript didn't occasionally break Chrome with an "Aw, Snap!" error...

          Wasn't it chrome where the super fast javascript was only available on x86 32-bit builds though?

          I use (linux) 64-bit versions, and javascript performance of FF (3.5.6) and chrome (4.0.266.0) seems to be pretty much identical...

          [... and so does the general performance; the main advantage of chrome on this system seems to be the per-tab processes, especially in low-memory situations, where they make it much easier to keep the browser size under control.]

  • Flash not working (Score:5, Insightful)

    by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @04:56PM (#30586408) Journal

    I thought flash not working is a feature.

    • by armanox ( 826486 )
      Flash works fine in chrome for me under Linux. Although not working would almost be like ad-block.
      • Safari on Mac OS actually has an adblock very like this... Click2Flash hides flash, and makes you click on it to make it work... it also lets you replace YouTube videos with h264 sources and play them with quicktime... Much nicer.

    • by GF678 ( 1453005 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:10PM (#30586578)

      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.

      • I thought half the point of Chromium was to get us the HTML5 video element and bypass the Flash.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Who uses flash on youtube if you have chrome? Just install the youtube html5-ifier [google.com]. Cuts CPU usage in half, works with most videos, and eliminates the need for flash or extra plugins to download the video-- just rightclick--> save.
      • YouTube's quality is crap (even with H.264), the interface is crap, the comments are crap, the recommendations are crap, the URL scheme is crap... Do I need to continue?

        YouTube is the lowest-common-denominator... Anything you find there, can be found in vastly better quality elsewhere, in a better format, etc.

        I dream of a world without YouTube, and I doubt it'll take long for it to happen.

    • I got Flash working just fine with Chrome and openSUSE 11.2, but I manually had to copy the file to /opt/google/chrome/plugins I believe.

    • by westlake ( 615356 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:55PM (#30587114)

      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.

    • by xeoron ( 639412 )
      I prefer to have flashblock plugin to manage that. There is now a Chrome plugin version of it.
  • Google Chrome linux (Score:4, Informative)

    by cavedweller96 ( 1549997 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @04:57PM (#30586432)
    Personally, I disagree. Flash works flawlessly on chrome. More features can be added later, you have to remember it is a beta. finally, as a person who had compiled Chrome OS, It works great. My only problem with it is lack of wireless card support, but once again BETA.
    • by rve ( 4436 )

      Personally, I disagree. Flash works flawlessly on chrome. More features can be added later, you have to remember it is a beta. finally, as a person who had compiled Chrome OS, It works great. My only problem with it is lack of wireless card support, but once again BETA.

      Gmail was in beta for more than 5 years,

  • But it only comes in an rpm with redhat-specific dependencies, so it doesn't work on my somewhat less common distribution. Why can't they just provide a mostly-static binary like Opera does?

    • by armanox ( 826486 )
      Actually they originally only provided a deb file (Debian and Ubuntu). The RPM is a newer addition to the releases. Also available as source code.
    • by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:09PM (#30586564)

      What are those dependencies, and how are they licensed? Depending on the license, static linking could force them to open source the entire application.

      This was a continuing source of irritation back when I worked on a closed source Linux app. The glibc people do not give a crap about binary-breaking changes. This resulted in us having to create multiple variants of our product to link against different versions of the runtime libs (in order to support older distros), multiplying our testing efforts by a factor of three. We desperately wanted to just link glibc statically, but that's a no-no because it's LGPL.

      • by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew@NOsPAM.gmail.com> on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:22PM (#30586724) Homepage Journal

        The entire Chrome application is open under a BSD license. You can check out the licenses of the dependencies as well here:

        http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html [google.com]

      • If you're having problems with different versions of glibc on different target system then nothing's preventing you from distributing your application together with your favorite glibc. It's not like disk space would be any concern with any reasonably large application. You could also cut down glibc to whatever you need. And BTW this is an advantage of Free software as you are automatically entitled to redistributing the library yourself.

        • by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:51PM (#30587042)

          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!

          • by fruey ( 563914 )

            It's been done before, depends what you need from the library : http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/ [www.fefe.de], http://www.uclibc.org/ [uclibc.org], etc (but these are clearly targetted at embedded systems).

            That being said, dependency hell is the main reason Linux cannot get ahead of Windows or Mac for the masses - the abstraction layer may not be as optimisable as on Linux, but you can distribute small binaries and be _sure_ they work out of the box with no issues.

        • by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:57PM (#30587162)

          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.

    • by Sits ( 117492 )

      I use a Chromium nightly tarball [chromium.org] unpacked to a directory in /tmp on Slackware 13.0. It wasn't straightforward but I did get it working by copying some libraries from firefox into the same directory.

  • by baldbobbo ( 883186 )
    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
  • by pwnies ( 1034518 ) * <j@jjcm.org> on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:03PM (#30586500) Homepage Journal
    I've been using a mix of chrome and chromium on linux now as my primary browser for the last six months. I'm surprised at how stable it actually is (especially now). When I first started using it, the chromium builds weren't integrated into the UI very well, and were very finicky (especially with plugins). Now though, I've had zero crashes with the latest build (4.0.266.0) that I'm using. Flash works great under Ubuntu 9.04 with chrome, the dom inspector is up and running, networking options are now available (an improvement from the previous chromium build I was using), complex scripts (hebrew, arabic, etc) are working, and UI is operating exactly how you'd expect it to. Oddly enough, the only problem I'm having with it, is if the width of a text input box goes larger than around 600 pixels, I can't select the text outside of that 600px with my mouse (not that it's a problem, I just click elsewhere and use my lovely keyboard to get me where I need to be). Other than that, zero problems. Very happy with it.
    • Same here. I've been using Chromium daily builds on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine for some time now. It runs quite well, Flash works, and it even has rudimentary support for adblock plus.

      My only complaint is the regressions and bugs in some of the builds, none of whom have effected stability. However, bugs are to be expected in such a release.

      I think the writer of this fine article is simply too picky, and using the wrong version of Chrome in the first place.
    • You know, interestingly enough, I've seen that behavior before on Slashdot, just never thought to narrow it down to a number of pixels before.

      This is in Firefox (on Windows XP) but it's EXACTLY the same problem.

      Odd, that.

      • by pwnies ( 1034518 ) *
        You know, it might be local to slashdot actually. I just tried it on gmail and it seems fine there.
      • by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        It's a "bug" in slashdot's HTML or something. There's a <div style="display: block;" id="slug-Bottom" class="slug"></div> tag with no content that is located in the HTML just after the QOTD but the stylesheet places it just above the QOTD on the right side of the screen. I haven't installed adblock and both fsdn and slashdot's domains are allowed in NoScript so it doesn't seem to be a blocked ad, and otherwise has no content at all. It sticks up far enough that it covers the bottom right corn

  • by diamondsandrain ( 1628327 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:04PM (#30586504)
    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.
    • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      There are various Chrome extensions that change the behaviour of tabs. Have you tried any of them?

    • I never understood why one would want to have the tabs save when you close the browser. Perhaps someone could enlighten me? maybe provide a few cases where this might actually be useful?

      Having a bunch of tabs when you start up the browser usually means things take longer to load, which slows me down when I only want to browse one page. Additionally when closing a browser, I close it because I'm done with whatever's in it. I think the main difference is usage. I use firefox windows as a sort of divider in ad

      • by oatworm ( 969674 )
        I've used tab saving before when I want to shut my computer off for the night but I have some tabs open with information I want to re-visit the next morning. That way I can finish reading what I was looking through without changing my home page(s) over and over again.
      • I use saved tabs as a sort of transient, rolling favourites folder for sites that I'll need next session but probably not after that. For example:

        1) Today I installed OpenSuse for the first time. I've had lots of tabs open on wikis, FAQs and HowTos while sorting out various issues (Take pity, I'm a n00b). Every time I reboot or log out then log back in, all of those tabs re-open and scroll down to where I was last reading them. Very handy.

        2) In work I need to read a lot of scientific papers. My normal
  • Given how Chrome, at least on Linux, is doing everything it needs to do just fine (quite well actually) I always wonder why it's not an official release yet.

  • I like it. I seem to be using it mostly know, even though firefox is installed on my system. There is one thing however, bookmarks, when I wanted to bookmark a page the UI was so simple (no file edit menus) that I did not know how to do it. Familiarity is one important tenant of user interface design.
  • Mostly good here. (Score:4, Informative)

    by headkase ( 533448 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:10PM (#30586572)
    I'm running Chrome in Ubuntu under Gnome and Compiz, I have Adobe's flash installed from restricted and swfdec removed (was blocking Adobe's) and all the extensions I've tried work: Feedly, Chromed Bird, Adblock, and so on. The only thing I notice about Flash (it even plays video fine!) is that sometimes input events such as clicking on a button in a flash element will "fall through" and not do anything. Annoying when your trying to select another YouTube video after the current one has finished playing. Overall though, my opinion is that it is already in an excellent state and can only get better from here: in active development.
    • by mutube ( 981006 )

      I get the same problem on Flash-clicking with Flash on Firefox. A temporary solution is to hold down Ctrl as you click (which suggests that the underlying Flash applet is receiving the left click as a right click and vice versa)

  • by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:17PM (#30586666) Homepage Journal

    I had two systems, both 64-bit Fedora, that I tried Chrome on. On one, Flash worked fine from the moment I installed Chrome. On the other, Chrome didn't even notice the plugin existed. Flash (32-bit, wrapped with mozilla-plugin-config) worked just fine in Firefox on both computers. When I compared the two systems, it turned out that one was missing a symbolic link. The file is in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped, but Chrome was looking in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.

    Adding a symbolic link solved it.

    More info: Getting Flash to work on Google Chrome for 64-bit Linux [hyperborea.org].

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Enderandrew ( 866215 )

      I'm running openSUSE 11.2 64-bit. I installed the actual 64-bit Flash with 64-bit Chrome. It works well.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Hel Toupee ( 738061 )
      Adobe has an 'Alpha' 64-bit Flash player out for Linux. It's kept up-to-date (well, sort of). I would consider it mid-Beta quality. Actually, it works just about as well as the 32bit official version, so, draw whatever conclusions you like. It's available on their 'Labs' section. Don't bother with the installer, it breaks things. Important things. Instead, just extract the .so and link it up yourself.
  • 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.
  • My experience with the latest version of Chrome on Ubuntu 9.10 & PCLinuxOS 2009 (.10?) has been an enjoyable one. I've had no problems with Flash and use an ad blocking extension & Firebug (which I like better than Firebug in Firebox). No need to beat the dead horse, but yes, it's sooo much more responsive than other browsers and the efficient use of screen real estate appeals to me as well.
  • RSS in Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Whitley ( 6067 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:33PM (#30586852) Homepage

    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.

    • Whups, forgot some key notes for would-be OS X extension users. You'll need a dev channel build and must invoke Chrome from the command line with flags to enable various behavior: --enable-extensions is what's needed here. See this Mac OS X Hints article [macosxhints.com] for other flags and a handy hack to make Chrome/Chromium start with the desired flags enabled via its app icon.

    • by eqisow ( 877574 )
      Perhaps I'm odd, but while I like my RSS reader, I prefer some things as live bookmarks. For example, Slashdot, xkcd, and other such sites where I at least look at most entries are in Akregator. However, I keep a few torrent feeds as well as an RSS for BIOS updates as live bookmarks.
    • by Rich0 ( 548339 )

      Frankly, I'd consider RSS as an add-on a feature, not a bug.

      The whole reason firefox was written was because mozilla became bloated with all kinds of junk, and was slower than molasses.

      The whole reason chrome is being written is that firefox today is what mozilla used to be.

      I just want a program that can render webpages. Sure, have a way to put in extensions, but let's keep the core simple!

  • by Rick Richardson ( 87058 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @05:37PM (#30586884) Homepage

    Fedora 11 and Adobe Flash works here...

    However, disabling IPV6 is not possible (unlike Firefox). So every access I wait for IPV6 DNS to timeout. It is really slow compared to Firefox.

    • by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @06:37PM (#30587858)

      Uhm, if you have a criminally broken router and feel no urge to work around it, you should disable IPv6 system-wide. No program should deal with such type of configuration on its own.

      And your configuration seems broken: if you don't have any IPv6 addresses better than link-local, glibc shouldn't even send AAAA queries, at least in any semi-recent version. If you have any better addresses (not necessarily globally routable), the queries will be sent but since they go exactly the same way A queries go, there's no way for A responses to come swiftly but AAAA having to timeout, save for something on the way sabotaging them and dropping them silently. And since you claim that this happens for every access, it's something near you.

      • Didn't Ubuntu 9.10 ship with a but that causes AAAA queries to be sent even if you don't have any IPv6 addresses? I believe the workaround of disabling IPv6 in Firefox was much simpler than disabling IPv6 system wide. F11 might have a similar issue. Cut the guy a little slack.

  • I use the Chromium daily dev PPA [launchpad.net] on Ubuntu Karmic and it's great. I'm using it now. I use Firefox for work browsing and Chromium for personal.

  • On my older IBM Linux system I use as a server, Firefox is sluggish, and Chrome is plain 'ol fast. My only gripe is that the fonts are offset a bit too low, since I strayed from Ubuntu's default font settings. But with the speed being actually usable(no keyboard delays, etc), I'm more than happy with this over firefox.

  • Sometimes my Chromium 4 on Linux breaks on some pages with the Aw snap! error but this is not very important. What's more important is that the ad blockers for Chrome are still very primitive compared to adblock+ for firefox. The GUI for selecting the ads to block is a pain to use and I quickly gave up using it. I'm using Firefox as my primary browser and Chromium for compatibility tests and this won't change until Chromium extensions gets on par in terms of usability (mainly adblock, firebug, noscript)
  • Flash is working for me, in Ubuntu 9.10, out of the box, no need to fix anything (Opera mostly works, but misses clicks of the mouse, it makes Flash unusable, I haven't seen this solved or even reported yet).

    Two minor gripes:

    - Bookmark management is crap. In both Firefox and Opera you can list bookmarks by different criteria (alphabetically, by last time of access, by time created).

    - There should be a setting to start in Incognito mode by default.

    Otherwise it looks like a very capable piece of software.

    So a

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