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2.0 Beta Chrome On Windows, Chromium On Linux

Posted by kdawson on from the ooh-shiny dept.

AlienRancher writes "Google launched this morning a new beta version of Chrome 2.0: 'The best thing about this new beta is speed — it's 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version.' Other enhancements include user script support (greasemonkey-like) and form auto-fill." And reader Lee Mathews adds news of the open source version, Chromium, on Linux: "Not only has Chromium gotten easier to take for a test drive thanks to the personal package archive for Ubuntu Chrome daily build team, but development on the browser is also progressing nicely. Despite being a very early build, Chromium on Linux feels solid and boasts the same blazing speed the Windows users have been enjoying for months."

17 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Still waiting for adblock :( by blahbooboo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I love Chrome, so fast!! Shame Firefox is so slow nowadays. Just wish there were adblock for Chrome and I am switching!

    1. Re:Still waiting for adblock :( by keeboo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Edit your hosts file (theres even one for Windows), and put in all adservers to redirect to localhost. There. No ads, similarly, no extra bloat from Adblock. Plus, it works on whatever, e-mail, browsers, etc.

      Thanks for the tip. But this has been discussed before on slashdot the problems with the privoxy and host file mechanisms.

      AFAIR Privoxy needs to load the whole page before delivering to the client (that's expected, since it needs the whole stuff in memory in order to analyse it properly).

      Anyways, if your problem is restricted to not displaying advertisements, you may try Ziproxy.
      It's a transcoding proxy (recompresses pictures and other stuff) and it has a number of weird features, one of those being an option which may be used to replace only pictures from a URL list for empty ones. Not really an ad-blocker proxy per se, but it may be used that way.

    2. Re:Still waiting for adblock :( by MadMaverick9 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Use SRWare Iron ... it has what you're asking for.

      It's based on Chromium, but without all the bad stuff plus AdBlock and more ...

      http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_news.php
      http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php

      11.10.2008: Adblocker integrated in Iron

      The wish of many users comes true: We integrated an Adblocker in Iron!
      With a filterlist so nearly all online-advertising can be blocked. A working list can be downloaded here and just has to be copied to the Iron folder (e.g: C:\Program Files\SRWare Iron\). Note: You must first get the latest version of Iron you can find under "Downloads".
      So Iron is the first Chromium based webbrowser worldwide which has an adblocker included.

      And ... SRWare Iron has a proper installer - per default it installs in "C:\Program Files", which is where applications belong.

      Unlike Chrome - which installs itself in "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\...." - argh - duh.

  2. but does it by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...still have the stupid installer that won't go away?

  3. Chrome - Feels Like A Running A New Computer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not sure how Google does it but running Chrome gives that feeling of when you get a new computer and all of your old apps seem lighting quick and responsive compared to before.

    But it isn't just the incredible speed of Chrome it is the fact that no matter how long you run it still feels exactly as quick and responsive as when you started it up. When I use to run Firefox a few months ago before switching to Chrome I could feel Firefox getting slower and slower and slower as the hours of use ticked by until finally getting annoyed enough to have to quit the app and restart it. Doesn't seem like a big deal but I would end up restarting Firefox three to four times every day just to clear out whatever 'junk' it seems to accumulate.

    I thought there were going to be all sorts of extensions I would miss but with Privoxy for ad blocking there isn't anything else that care about. Extensions in Chrome will be nice but so far Chrome + Privoxy is browsing heaven.

  4. Is this a WINE wrapper? by bootup · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I didn't read the article- but is this the WINE supported version or an actual x86 compiled native build for GNU/Linux they refer? Or is this something completely different altogether? Based on the few comments I actually read it sounds like this isn't Google's browser even.

  5. Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Let's just sum up the state of the three major browsers:

    Chrome
    Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.
    Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.
    Quick and responsive native UI.

    IE
    Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.
    Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.
    Quick and responsive native UI.

    Firefox
    All tabs and Javascript run in one giant mess. One execution heavy tab drags down the performance of the entire browser
    No memory protection. Everything is in one gigantic soup of data. One tab crashes, down goes the whole browser
    Clunky and slow crossplatform UI implementation

    The latest IE 8's absolutely smoke Firefox in performance and stability. What an absolute humiliation for the Firefox developers. They had years to get their shit together. But they sat on their asses and now they have been left in the technological dust by both Google and Microsoft.

    High five Firefox devs!

    1. Re:Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Let's just sum up the state of the three major browsers:

      Chrome
      Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.
      Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.
      Quick and responsive native UI.

      IE
      Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.
      Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.
      Quick and responsive native UI.

      Firefox
      All tabs and Javascript run in one giant mess. One execution heavy tab drags down the performance of the entire browser
      No memory protection. Everything is in one gigantic soup of data. One tab crashes, down goes the whole browser
      Clunky and slow crossplatform UI implementation

      The latest IE 8's absolutely smoke Firefox in performance and stability. What an absolute humiliation for the Firefox developers. They had years to get their shit together. But they sat on their asses and now they have been left in the technological dust by both Google and Microsoft.

      High five Firefox devs!

      Well given that that AC's post is technically accurate I don't really think it's a troll. It's true, Firefox failed to advance in many respects, the way it should have giving its high level of funding. It leaks like a sieve, everybody knows that. I too have to restart it every couple of days or it ooms my machine. Keyboard navigation is still very dodgy. It has big problems with spinning on on web pages that konq just loads gracefully. Etc.

      Yes, you can say it's better than IE 5/6/7. I don't know about IE 8, jury is out.

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    2. Re:Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage by lordSaurontheGreat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      A little revolution every now and then is a good thing, don't you think?

      Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox -> Webkit (Chrome and Safari)
                        -> IE 6 ->

      --
      Consider yourself spoken to.
    3. Re:Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      All of the Firefox UI, as well as anything that ever touches anything DOM, run on the same thread. That's why the new worker threads stuff doesn't support .responseXML - that would require a DOM, and touching that on a background thread is a good way to crash Firefox.

      Firefox uses threads for network requests. Not for DNS lookups though, that would confuse proxy auto-config scripts.

      Your first bug hasn't got debug symbols so I can't tell what's going on, but the second on is a race between network requests and threads are not directly related in the way you think.

    4. Re:Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and Safari.

      I don't think it will be the geeks that will abandon Firefox first, I think it'll be the casual users. Here's a browser that 1) is visibly much faster, and 2) is from a well-known brand. And... "adblock"? what's "adblock"?

      Plugins will surely follow, nonetheless. Maybe not in Chrome per se, but hey, it's OSS for a reason...

      On the Linux front things are interesting, too. Gnome is slowly but steadily moving to WebKit for all its HTML rendering needs, including Epiphany. From what I heard, KDE4 is also going to replace KHTML with WebKit (or did they backtrack on that?). It seems that everyone is converging on WebKit as the cross-platform, OSS Web browser engine. And I don't think that bodes well for Gecko or Firefox.

    5. Re:Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The "Linux" Chrom(ium) is 32-bit only, and everything indicates it is also Linux-only, meaning they just replaced crappy platform-dependent WinAPI code with not-less-crappy Linux code. Wake me up when I can compile Chrapmium on OpenBSD.

      There is no way you can compare a visualbasic gui slapped on top of WebKit with a full-featured cross-platform browser like firefox. Process separation sounds like a good idea now that everyone has crappy code that crashes every now and then.

      I would rather Firefox developers focusing in making the code more stable and threadable instead of adding unneeded process overhead.

  6. Did they say it was to be based on GTK? by bogaboga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think I heard that somewhere. Here is my hope: -

    As Google releases these betas, those capable keep up and push out a native QT (and therefore KDE) based "Google Chrome" browser. I hope this is not too much to ask for.

    On a side note, I wonder why they have to call it "Google Chrome" on Windows and "Chromium" on Linux.

  7. All I can say to this is... by david.given · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...my god it's fast.

    Start up in under half a second. From cold.

    When you resize it, the text moves smoothly, the way old-fashioned Xlib apps used to do. My Firefox installation gets about two redraws a second.

    Render speed seems to be decent, and it generally feels snappy in a way that Firefox doesn't.

    However: this is in no way ready to be used as a browser, even if you're masochistic. No dialogue boxes, so no setting of options. No tab control; you always see the most recent tab, and there's no way of selecting another one. Rendering glitches; Slashdot won't render, for example (although this might be considered a feature). And it's unstable. Five minutes playing made it crash three times.

    But I'm going to continue watching with great interest. I'd love to ditch Firefox.

  8. Re:Namespace collision by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's only called "Chromium" because it's an unofficial build

    You seem to think Chromium is to Chrome what Minefield is to Firefox (Can't that be represented as Chromium:Chrome::Minefield:Firefox?)
    I am pretty sure that Chrome is more of a branded fork, like IceCat (Iceweasel?) is to Firefox.

  9. Re:Chrome still misses the point by daver00 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As a web developer myself who used to use firebug, Chrome has turned out to be by far the better tool. The javascript console is a whole lot better than firebug. When you are in Chrome, click the little page menu icon, and in the menu there is a flyout called "Developer". They have actually built web development tools into the browser, screw half-assed bodgey addons, Chrome is the ducks nuts when it comes to web development.

    I hate using firefox now that I've become accustomed to Chrome, on any system of any spec firefox is just slow as a dog, far slower than IE7 even which is embarrassing. What really gets to me about firefox is the linux build is near unusable in its slowness. I have it on my xubuntu eee pc, and its just about worthless as a web browser, especially in that limited environment.

  10. Google, change the name! by martin-boundary · · Score: 2, Interesting
    There already is a Chromium on Linux, which IMHO has priority on the name. It's an arcade game which has been around for years.

    I really think Google should rethink the name 'Chromium' for their browser on Linux. Don't be evil and all that.

    Mozilla did it when their browser name clashed with an open source database project, too.