Monday, October 12. 2009Chromium: It really shines Have you tried it yet? I'm running the Chromium "Daily Builds" on Kubuntu 9.10. At first, not very long ago, I was quite skeptical about Chromium. It looked unfamiliar, it seemed to lack features. Then, about a week ago, I gave it another try. And boy, has it improved! To give you some back story on my personal history of browser usage, I'm a die hard Opera fan. I've been using Opera since about 10 years, and nothing ever came close to its performance, usability, and elegance. In fact Opera used to be the last remaining non-free software that I used on a daily basis. While I'm a huge supporter of Free Software, I didn't feel bad about using it, as it was just so damn good. Still, I would have preferred a good free alternative, but nothing else did it for me (including Firefox). Now, what makes Chromium so great? Let me just list a few things that I love about it: Where there is light, there is also shadow, and there is one thing about Chromium that I find a bit sad: Why did they not use Qt from the beginning? Qt would have provided a perfect foundation for a cross-platform application. Google probably had its reasons for doing it differently (I assume it's simply time-to-market, they made a pure Windows version first), but that's still one aspect that they could have done better. Anyway, Chromium's GUI is rather simplistic, so the choice of toolkit doesn't make a very big difference to the user. Trackbacks
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Re: Qt
If you look into the code it actually makes some sense, they do lots of crazy Windows things on Windows.
Well if they did, it would be very interesting to see what the Qt 4.6 version would bring
let me just list a few things that i can't live without:
mousegestures: i know kde has systemwide gestures. no idea how that works though, if it does in current state at all. bookmark nicknames: shift + f2 anyone? * flexible ui: no idea if chromium has the mdi similar to opera's.
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Mousegestures+for+all+Browsers?content=109576
Mousegestures in Chrome work perfectly with that (you need afaik KDE 4.3 for that) Neil
Mouse gestures:
http://www.chromeplugins.org/extensions/chrome-gestures-google-chrome-mouse-gestures-extension/
It's very fast indeed! Font rendering sucks here for some reason (very blurry) compared to konqueror, rekonq and firefox.
Chromium is using Subversion. The Git repo is only the (rather inofficial) mirror via git-svn.
I don't understand why Google starts with Windows only releases. From one tech talk I went to, I got the impression that the box they set up for you as a new employee would be running Ubuntu.
As I wrote: Time-to-market is my guess. They absolutely wanted to get something out there ASAP, to get some leverage in the browser market. Google has many many "labs" projects, and this might just have been one of them. They realized its potential, and realized that time is of the essence in this game.
That's my guess anyway.
Google certainly don't have all their employees on Ubuntu. Certainly their developers can use Ubuntu but a bunch use OSX or Windows too.
This wasn't a labs project, this has had a lot of manpower and promotion thrown behind it from the beginning. They have a full team in Europe working on the V8 engine (from what I can remember). They just wrote it for Windows first because it's by far the biggest market and, as Mark points out, you can get it out much quicker if you develop only for one OS than for multiple. I do agree it might have made more sense to use Qt but at the time it may not have been LGPL and even then Chromium is BSD licensed so ironically Qt may not have been "free" enough for Google.
Isn't it only V8 that's BSD-licensed?
(And wasn't it largely written by Sun employees?)
Why to even run Ubuntu when there are multiple Linux distributions using the Linux OS and GNU devels. Google should do software what is not tied to any OS (Linux or NT) and especially if using Linux OS and GNU tools on development, tied them to any distributions like Ubuntu.
I have been using chromium from the day it arrived in ubuntu's ppa (Now I use it from opensuse's build service as I shifted to OpenSUSE).
I have not looked back ever since. It is hands down the best browser (IMHO).
Not so free, I can't download it from Cuba....
No Cubans allowed in http://www.google.com/chrome ...
Don't blame Google, it's probably a US government restriction as Google is a US corporation.
Have you tried compiling it from http://code.google.com/chromium/ ?
We all agree that Webkit proves how great KDE technology is. How about some of Webkit's greatness coming back to KHTML too? Right now, Konqueror is all but obsolete as a web browser (at least on my desktop). I've always wanted an alternative to Firefox and Chrome seems to be getting there. Which is a pity since I wanted it to be Konqueror with all my heart!
Please do check out rekonq. It's a webkit browser being designed as a replacement of sorts for Konqueror. It sports KDE integration and is fast and light.
The project just had a 0.2 release recently, but the git version is mighty stable, too. In fact, I've pretty much moved over to rekonq now and it's pretty good. Do contribute, if you're a coder. As a user, I'd love to see rekonq replace konqueror as KDE's default browser by KDE 4.5 or so!
I have not yet tried Rekonq, but please, consider changing its name
I'm still waiting for some privacy options, e.g. the possibility to automatically delete all personal data (cookies etc.) when closing the browser.
Jesus Christ, would you please stop mentioning each and every time that WebKit is based KHTML like WebKit was forked just yesterday? It's getting embarrassing. Todays WebKit has little to nothing to do with KHTML even if they share the same historic roots. All the huge improvements WebKit has made in recent years have nothing to do with KHTML and everything to do with Apple's (and Google's to a lesser extent) paid engineers.
Hey, at least no one is calling it GNU/Webkit or KHTML/Webkit... so calm down!
I agree with you dude! it's really time to stop this! it just begins to sound a like bite envious - KHTML have to show themselves how beautiful it is! If we can't do this, it's time to join a group to do it better!
we should call it GNU/LINUX/KHTML/webkit KHTML was once developed on Gnu/Linux :D:D:D
I'm using Opera since 3.6, too, and propably will ever stick to that finest piece of software I know - I just got too much used to it, so that I always miss something when using other browser, and all the time I find new cool functions of Opera (e.g. shift+F2 from this thread...).
And it looks so good with shared Qt4. It would be so great, if Opera (at least the framework, one could change the engine) would become opensource.
And what about a Chromium Qt-based browser ???
I mean what make Chrome interesting isn't only webkit but also V8. So Rekonq or Aurora are pretty cool, but lack something. Maybe what KDE need is a chromium-based navigator, with Kross integratiob for making extension.
To echo previous comments, Rekonq looks promising as a KDE-webkit browser. However, I'd prefer a Qt version of Chromium. Chromium does so much right.
I'm not a GTK advocate but how could have QT done a better job than GTK. It looks great and is lightning quick.
Sure it would have been better for Google to have developed one multi-platform browser and we would have had the best browser straight away but its good to have a decent browser on Linux at last. Firefox was crashy, Opera wouldn't run flash for me, Konq wouldn't render my banking site nor Slashdot and GMail was hit and miss.
Chromium is amazing
 As far as why they didn't use Qt: "It's not due to any dislike of Qt, but just because there's more experience on the team with GTK and it matches the existing Firefox dependency on Linux. Please keep calm. :)" (http://dev.chromium.org/developers/faq) By the way, there IS a Chrome for Qt. Sort of. http://code.google.com/p/qrome/ I haven't tried it... but it exists. Not updated since January 2009, but maybe someone can kickstart it...
You misunderstood me a bit. My point was not "Why GTK instead of QT?".
But rather: "Why did they not use Qt from the beginning, but instead made a pure Windows version first?" Big difference
Yeah, I've seen that quote before. It's pretty much a "going with what we know instead of what's best". This isn't to imply Qt is best, although I do feel that way, but rather to point out that they didn't say they went with GTK because of superior technology.
Also, the "matches the existing Firefox dependency on Linux" is nonsense. Qt, like GTK, is part of LSB.
The only thing I have a problem with (and that is with all the webkit based browsers I tried) is the font rendering.
Forget what the website thinks, I want to choose what fonts are used (just like in Firefox). That is my only pet peeve with Chromium. That and all the evil Google tracking features
i've yet to come round to being wowed by google's browser. i still prefer, konqueror, firefox, midori, seamonkey, other mozillas (iceweasle, swiftfox, etc), k-meleon, elinks, etc!
but one thing not putting me off is gtk over qt. i cannot stand qt, i utterly detest it. maybe i've just never had it shown to me in a way i like it, but i cannot get my head around why anyone actually likes it. completely baffling, boggling, perplexing... it's just beyond any scope of reason to me. now thats not to say i love gtk. it can be a real pain in the ass should you ever want to poke your nose under the hood. but at least it doesnt look like some shoddy weekend rush job by a blind programmer with a impaired sense of aesthetics, and has been listing to "ad men" about white space more than geeks about screen space. so anyways, maybe it's time i gave it another look, maybe i'll be impressed too. i just wanted to have my say somewhere about the whole "why didnt google use Qt" thing. i think they made the smart move.
I'd love to see a Qt version of Chromium. Rekonq looks pretty good in the latest release I installed on my system but it still isn't a good substitute for Chromium.
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