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."

Comments

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?

Re:UI responsiveness

[Hurricane78]

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. :)

Re:UI responsiveness

[Inda]

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.

Re:UI responsiveness

[Hurricane78]

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*

Re:UI responsiveness

[Rei]

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...

Re:UI responsiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

The original post said:

Convert it to byte or machine in run time, or something.

This would make it go faster, but you are still held back by how good the compiler is at translating the high level language to machine code. C & C++ compilers have been around for a long time and subject to much research so are quite good at their job. XUL is much newer and much higher level, so compilation probably still isn't that great and will rely on newer research.

The other thing is that compilation at install time avoids a startup wait, but also doesn't give the app a chance to profile and optimise the executing code. Something like a JIT which then keeps the results for future sessions is probably close to what you want without adding too much complexity, although means the first ever run of some new code branch will be a slow path (often seen with the pause when opening a new dialog in a Java app which is yet to be fully loaded and optimised).

It'll take a while and a fair amount of research for XUL to get upto native speeds and have a level footing against things like GTK+, but I don't think its impossible. Hopefully the implementation/debugging/portability gains Firefox gets from XUL allow time to be spent improving that technology.

THX138

Re:UI responsiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4067911/Aho_-_Compilers_-_Principles__Techniques__and_Tools_2e.pdf
Please seed!

Re:UI responsiveness

[Anonymous Cowpart]

But you could even try to optimize it. Convert it to byte or machine in run time, or something.

If you think it's all so damn straightforward and easy, why don't you submit a patch?
Oh, but you don't write code? You don't wish to spend your own time on it? You're just too bloody lazy?

Sheesh...

Re:UI responsiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

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. :)

Let us know when your patch to do this gets into a release.

Re:UI responsiveness

[macshit]

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.]

Re:UI responsiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you get just what weird things you're allowed to do with XUL, and how closely tied it is to the HTML parser. From my understanding, Firefox is just a glorified HTML, I mean XUL, application written in Javascript that can call C++ libraries. For your suggestion to make any sense I think you'd need to compile the whole web ;-)

Re:UI responsiveness

[jthill]

That's hilarious: it's real.

Hell, I own the book, the pdf might come in handy.

Re:UI responsiveness

[jthill]

Nevermind, it's a fax-quality scan.

Re:UI responsiveness

[mcrbids]

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 working on a problem that doesn't get solved quickly, you can be sure that it's not what you think!

Re:UI responsiveness

[DrXym]

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.

Re:UI responsiveness

[DrXym]

The responsiveness of Firefox is just fine on any modern PC (i.e. made in the last 5 years). I even use it on a Asus Eee 701 netbook and it's still usable although it suffers from the small cramped display.

Google Chrome certainly starts faster and feels a small bit more responsive but these are hardly deal breakers IMO. As a prospective user I would be more concerned about the amount of information you'd be feeding Google just by using their browser. Now they have the potential to see EVERYWHERE you go, not just what you choose to search for through their site.

Re:UI responsiveness

[sopssa]

I agree you on the Google information feeding part. But firefox's UI responsivess is still a deal breaker for me, after using Opera for 10+ years.

Re:UI responsiveness

[MBGMorden]

It can't be just XUL. Firefox is pretty snappy on both Windows and Mac systems. Not a rocket, but still responsive. On Linux though Firefox - and even other browsers using Gecko like Galeon or Epiphany (the normal non-webkit version) - are just slow to the point of being painful to use. The web browsing alone was a major part of keeping me out of Linux more often.

Chromium however, hauls ass on Linux. Sure, there's a few extensions I miss, but overall I'm willing to deal with that for the faster response.

Re:UI responsiveness

[Hurricane78]

Let me guess: The “mfl” still is pretty much plain text XUL. Just in a more efficient form.
Also, how do you serialize JS functions?

I’m thinking more “XUL.so” (or .dll) here.

Re:UI responsiveness

[Zephiris]

SeaMonkey (2.0) is based on the same components as Firefox (3.5), but the UI response is normal because it's extended from the original Mozilla Suite. Firefox, since its inception, has had single-thread, single-engine-for-entire-browser JS engine, which the UI (written in XUL) also uses. That typically leads to crap response, hanging if something doesn't expect that to happen.

SeaMonkey doesn't have that limitation. It doesn't have a 'faster JS engine' than FF (though Opera's is much slower), but responds much snappier, never 'hangs' if you have some JS taking up a lot of CPU time. It also generally uses less memory per-tab than FF, sadly enough, while being compatible with the most popular extensions (and there being extensions on addons.mozilla.com and xsidebar site making it act just like FF).

As perhaps the one caveat, though, certain Microsoft software (virtualearth/bing maps) refuse to recognize it or that it can handle SVG, throws a silent exception for which it -silently- mangles certain sites that use its service for mapping basic addresses and forms (cough, Pizza Hut, cough).

Flash not working

[avandesande]

I thought flash not working is a feature.

Re:Flash not working

[armanox]

Flash works fine in chrome for me under Linux. Although not working would almost be like ad-block.

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:Flash not working

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Flash not working

[short]

Do you call GPLv3+ gnash plugin an extension or workaround? What is a proprietary Flash player else than an extension? And what 3rd-party player are you talking about?

Re:Flash not working

[Sir_Lewk]

Well, I use a short shell-script to play youtube url's with mplayer. Works a hell of a lot nicer for me (especially fullscreen). To me, lack of flash is certainly a feature.

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:Flash not working

[FooAtWFU]

I thought half the point of Chromium was to get us the HTML5 video element and bypass the Flash.

Re:Flash not working

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash works fine for me. I'm running the Chrome beta in a 64bit version of Ubuntu. This is a test machine, and I only tried the Adobe plug-in for Chrome. I haven't tried using Gnash, and I'm not sure if that would make a difference.

Re:Flash not working

[beelsebob]

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.

Re:Flash not working

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out this chrome extension:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kchoimdlcbapmcdnheaahjcdpdjdpfco

It takes the youtube h264 file (which is there for things like the iphone) and then just inlines it in chrome via an html5 video tag. It's totally transparent and works great, the only downside is it's missing fullscreen and for some videos there is no h264 version so it falls back to flash.

Re:Flash not working

[xeoron]

I prefer to have flashblock plugin to manage that. There is now a Chrome plugin version of it.

Re:Flash not working

[GF678]

It's totally transparent and works great, the only downside is it's missing fullscreen

I don't consider a lack of fullscreen support as something that "works great".

Perhaps you can Compiz zoom into the video area, but it's messy and doesn't work as well as a proper fullscreen.

Re:Flash not working

[LordLimecat]

Who uses flash on youtube if you have chrome? Just install the youtube html5-ifier. 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.

Re:Flash not working

[Anonymous Coward]

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 have a queue of shit to watch at home so I'm not trying hard to add to it. That said, the fact that Chrome and YouTube are both Google products, I think the likelihood of YouTube working on a Google-branded Chrome device to be high.

This is a point of absuridity in commenting on these speculative stories, I believe you have reached it.

Re:Flash not working

[jonadab]

> I thought flash not working is a feature.

Yeah, but Firefox has that too (optionally). It's called FlashBlock, and what really rocks is that you can over-ride it and enable Flash just for a specific piece of content (e.g., an embedded video on your friend's blog) without turning it on for every stupid Flash thing on the whole web, or even the whole page.

Believe me, if it weren't for FlashBlock, I wouldn't have Flash installed.

Re:Flash not working

[armanox]

I'll have to check that out.

Re:Flash not working

[evilviper]

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.

Re:Flash not working

[Razalhague]

To the geek.

We're talking about Chrome on Linux here.

Re:Flash not working

[drinkypoo]

Youtube works after I enable a couple of things with noscript. Many other video sites still don't work after I have enabled everything which deserves to be enabled, and then I leave them. Youtube wins as long as most other video sites are even shittier than youtube, and they are.

Re:Flash not working

[KnownIssues]

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.~ C.S. Lewis

Did anyone else read that as "trannies" the first time they read it?

Re:Flash not working

[slim]

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?

If someone sends me a link to YouTube, what relevance do any of these issues have to me?

Re:Flash not working

[evilviper]

Quality is still crap, you have no clue what the video might be from the link, and you're left to deal with the lousy interface for video playback. In other words, almost all of them continue to apply. It's a shame you can't read.

Re:Flash not working

[slim]

You missed the point. Your original point seemed to be that it didn't matter that Flash didn't work, because YouTube has all these faults.

But if someone sends me a link to YouTube, I don't care that the same video is available elsewhere in better quality or with a better interface. I just want to view the content I've been directed towards. Ergo, I need Flash to work on my browser.

(Moot anyhow - Flash works in Chrome)

Re:Flash not working

[evilviper]

But if someone sends me a link to YouTube, I don't care that the same video is available elsewhere in better quality or with a better interface.

ummm... Why don't you care? Horrible-quality videos don't look decent because someone pointed you there... Annoying flash animations aren't less annoying because someone directed you there...

I just want to view the content I've been directed towards. Ergo, I need Flash to work on my browser.

A quick search for the title of that Youtube page will almost certainly find the exact same video elsewhere, in very little time, with no flash plugin.

Of course there are also YouTube downloaders that don't require Flash at all, and play the videos much faster with MPlayer, VLC, et al.

so you don't use it yet are somehow qualifed?

[Anonymous Coward]

slashdot? Oh, nevermind !!

Re:so you don't use it yet are somehow qualifed?

[SnarfQuest]

You get plenty of reviews on slashdot by people who never use the device. For example: the Amazon kindle, Microsoft Windows, and girlfriends.

Re:so you don't use it yet are somehow qualifed?

[Anonymous Coward]

You get plenty of reviews on slashdot by people who never use the device. For example: the Amazon kindle, Microsoft Windows, and girlfriends.

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. "

Google Chrome linux

[cavedweller96]

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.

Re:Google Chrome linux

[rve]

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,

Re:Google Chrome linux

[psbrogna]

Some would argue that there are currently market-leading OSes still in Beta.

Re:Google Chrome linux

[crazycheetah]

There's a few gripes on this article about Chrome on Linux that I don't agree with or care about. For RSS, for example, I can't say I care about it. On my mobile phone (though I have the droid, and I have to say, the only time RSS tempts me is when I'm not on wifi with it...) or maybe a plasma widget (KDE4) on my desktop, RSS is great. But in a browser, or where a browser is easy enough to access just as easy as anything RSS, I don't care. I like going to the website and seeing it that way, and otherwise haven't found much use for RSS. But that is personal preference, so I guess Google needs to get on that for some people.

As for Flash... I've been using it since you had to have the --enable-plugins flag when you ran Chrome. Back then, it was buggy in some circumstances. Now, I haven't had a problem in as long as I can remember not having to use that flag and a little before that.

Plus extensions work well now. Only problem there, is that some of them are shoot and miss at times. Some work great, some need a little work. That's typical of any application with extensions/plugins for me, though.

Complex scripts and KDE are two more things I don't care, so I leave it to others to know if Google needs work there. I run KDE, but I deal with GTK apps enough, I'm familiar with the GTK interface. It bothers me to some degree (I hate some of GTK's dialogs compared to Qt/KDE's, as personal preference), but Google's far from the only one that would need to work on that, if I was to gripe about that. Complex scripts on the other hand, I just don't deal with, so I refrain saying anything.

I'm using Chrome on Linux to type this, though. I've pretty much fallen to only using it, except when I can't. Some websites don't recognize it (Yahoo mail, I'm looking at you; coupled with finding out I have to go through their ridiculous--well, actually, pretty good for what it is--mobile site on my droid, instead of using a more uniform interface for the OS--I have to pay for POP access?! >.< I used to use POP on my WinMo Treo with them, too--has led me to tell everyone using my Yahoo mail to switch to a gmail that I can just filter specific tags on to), and so you either can't access it all, or have to use some light version of the site that just doesn't make sense--this is Chrome; I should be able to use the damn javascript heavy page just fine! As such, I still have Firefox installed for now like 1 site that I use for work, which only lets IE and Firefox use it for some retarded reason (that's the only options it actually says, anyway). My view of it remains, however, that Chrome is a great browser on Linux. I'm not a fan of Firefox, to be honest, and Chrome suits my needs and wishes for a browser wonderfully.

Re:Google Chrome linux

[The End Of Days]

Sure, but some would argue that shit tastes just fine and the texture is otherworldly.

Which is to say that opinions are like assholes. Fuck em.

Re:Google Chrome linux

[nomadic]

Wine was in beta for 15 years.

Re:Google Chrome linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet it kicks every webmail's ass.

Re:Google Chrome linux

[jonadab]

> For RSS, for example, I can't say I care about it.

Indeed. I have a podcatcher, which reads the feeds and downloads any new content automatically on a cron job while I sleep, so why would I need RSS support in the browser? Just so I can have "Live Bookmarks"? Meh. Not important.

Having said that, Chrome is at this point still missing some features that really prevent me from using it on a regular basis.

Number one for me is the ability to disable page-specified colors and browse using my own preferred colors. I know most people would never use this, but for me it's an accessibility requirement, because the blinding white backgrounds that are so popular on the web are just way too much. (My eyes are unusually sensitive to light. It does have its upsides. I can read comfortably in light that would have some people stumbling around trying to find a lightswitch.) I have to have low-contrast colors on the screen, and the background color needs to be the darker one. Otherwise I can only browse for a few minutes at a time, squinting, and then I get a headache and have to quit.

I also don't want to do without bookmark keywords, which have been built into all Gecko-based browsers for over a decade. The ability to set a minimum font size is nice, especially if you've got your resolution cranked up pretty high.

There are also some quite useful features that are supplied in Firefox by popular extensions, which appear to be thus far missing for Chrome unless I'm missing something. Probably the most important of these is FlashBlock. I can't imagine how anyone can live without FlashBlock, except by not having Flash installed at all. Beyond that, I am also unwilling to use a browser that doesn't have Nuke Anything Enhanced or the equivalent functionality. ImageZoom is really nice too. User Agent Switcher occasionally comes in handy, as well. Oh, and the Web Developer toolbar is very handy, not just for web development but also for the way it lets you quickly and conveniently turn certain options on and off (client-side scripts, redirects, page colors, ...) And if you're trying to learn an Asian language, rikaichan is helpful.

As for the speed, maybe I'm looking at the wrong sites (I tested the Order of the Stick, How to Spot a Psychopath, Life at Patience Corners, and Perlmonks. ), but I don't see a big difference in speed between Firefox and Chrome. I've done a couple of side-by-side comparison (time how long a page takes to load in the one browser, then time the same page in the other browser), and while Chrome did come out slightly ahead, it was only about a 20% difference, well below what I'd have been likely to notice if I hadn't been timing it. The lack of bookmark keywords alone would cost me more time than the 20% faster page loading would save me. Startup time's noticeably faster for Chrome, but since I normally only restart my browser after power outages and browser upgrades (and tend to delay the latter until I'm restarting anyway due to the former), that's not really an important issue for me. YMMV.

sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

who really cares? it's beta.. you don't like it? don't use it. You like it? fine, use it. geeshh..... and to bitch about the lack of KDE integration.. who cares? really. It doesn't integrate with my desktop and you don't see me bitching to my mother about it

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?

Re:sigh

[larry bagina]

And since Chrome OS will be a full-screen web page on top of linux, kde integration is not applicable.

It is slightly amusing that KHTML became WebKit became Chrome with GTK underneath. At least it wasn't the windows version recompiled with WINE.

Re:sigh

[Enderandrew]

That was the first way to get Chrome running under Linux, was with Wine. I wouldn't be shocked if some people were still doing that.

My wife doesn't like the lack of top and buttom buttons on the scrollbar with the GTK/Linux version of Chrome, where as the Windows version has normal scroll buttons. If she keeps griping about them, I may install Chrome via Wine on her laptop.

Re:sigh

[bvankuik]

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

I would appreciate it if Chrome took it's default font size/color from the KDE settings. What would even be better is if there was a KDE theme that also took over the KDE look and feel for the browser window and the tabs, and the buttons and dialogues that Chrome has.

Re:sigh

[Wintervenom]

This is not so much the job of Chrome as it is of GTK. Have you tried making it use the GTK Qt engine [gtk-qt-engine]? That -- and setting Use System Title Bar and Borders -- will at least get Chrome to match your text and Qt engine style.

Re:sigh

[Xugumad]

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

Re:sigh

[pclminion]

If you think the Chrome developers aren't reading this very thread, you're crazy. This is a good a forum as any to provide feedback.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh.. OK, valid point - it is beta and there should be some feedback / critique, but shouldn't that be done to the developers rather than as a 'review'?? Reviewing beta software seems pointless unless you're submitting your findings to the developers, which in this case they're not - they're posting on some blog site of sorts trying to drum up hits.

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.

Re:sigh

[reub2000]

Arora and Konqueror both fit the bill nicely.

Re:sigh

[Kelvie]

Honestly, I use KDE and I know it doesn't really look much like a GTK app, but I (and all KDE users) would _really_ appreciate it if it would use the KDE file dialog. Every time the GTK+ file dialog pops up, I want to hurt an animal. A really cute animal, if possible.

Re:sigh

[pclminion]

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?

If it were me, I can't imagine why I'd deliberately ignore very specific comments regardless of their source. Obviously the issues should be tracked, so I'd spend a few hours entering the salient comments into my issue tracking system. The user is already doing significant work for me by even using my product. I'm not suggesting that I would scour the entire Internet, but Slashdot is a freebie as I read it on a daily basis.

I would have tried it

[iamacat]

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?

Re:I would have tried it

[armanox]

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.

Re:I would have tried it

[pclminion]

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.

Re:I would have tried it

[Enderandrew]

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

Flash works fine

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running ubuntu using a weak desktop-- flash works perfectly, and the browser is 10x faster than any others I've tried. I was previously using ephiphany, but chrome makes ephiphany look like firefox.

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:Flash works fine...

[ArsonSmith]

I'm lactose intolerant you insensitive clod

Re:Flash works fine...

[Hel Toupee]

Flash works as well in Chrome as it does in Firefox. Flash performance on Linux is far below what I would consider "fine". At least in Chrome, when Flash starts gobbling up RAM and CPU, you just lose the one tab, and not the entire browser.

Re:Flash works fine...

[teko_teko]

I'm lactose intolerant you insensitive clod

Me too, but I still love ice cream. Just can't have that second serving...

Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that the Linux version is a beta and extension support is only available in the betas, they have a surprisingly large number of extensions.

Re:Extensions

[srh2o]

A good place to start is the problematic extensions page http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

Long (relatively) user here.

[pwnies]

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.

Re:Long (relatively) user here.

[stakovahflow]

Ditto... I've been using Chromium on Arch 2009.08... Stable as they come. Surprisingly fast, even on the EEE 1000HA & 701.

I'd probably never use Chrome OS, but there is very little wrong with the browser...

Installed adobe flashplayer from pacman and pressed on.

Not too bad, IMHO...

--Stak

Re:Long (relatively) user here.

[Thelasko]

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.

Re:Long (relatively) user here.

[natehoy]

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.

Re:Long (relatively) user here.

[pwnies]

You know, it might be local to slashdot actually. I just tried it on gmail and it seems fine there.

Re:Long (relatively) user here.

[crazycheetah]

Wow. I've noticed the 600 pixels things a few times. It's hit me on slashdot--always seems to be the bottom right of it this text box in certain circumstances, specifically. It never bothered me enough to actually even check if anyone else had the problem. Plus with how many weird things I've been seeing KDE doing lately (parts are getting better and other parts worse... some of them are just weird bugs, like my background always being blank when I first get into KDE besides knowing what I set it as--easy enough, just go into Desktop properties and hit Ok, and that's fixed), I never fully counted that against Chrome, though it seemed most likely. That there is my biggest complaint about Chrome (and it doesn't even bother me that much...).

Re:Long (relatively) user here.

[Qzukk]

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 corner of the reply box when you're replying to a story itself or replying to the last comment of the story. According to DOM Inspector, its rules come from http://a.fsdn.com/sd/idlecore-tidied.css?T_2_5_0_283 and has a width of 336px and a height of 250px and is absolutely positioned at the right, with "bottom: 100%" which places the bottom 100% from the bottom of the footer div (in other words, it ends at the top of the footer div).

Re:Long (relatively) user here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, Hebrew and Arabic are not complex scripts, they are right-to-left scripts. While right-to-left scripts are a lot more work to get right than simple scripts like Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, they are a lot easier to get right than the true complex scripts. Complex scripts are used for many languages of South Asia and Southeast Asia:

• Burmese
• Devanagari
• Gujarati
• Kannada
• Khmer
• Malayalam
• Oriya
• Sinhala
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Tibetan

It doesn't matter to most people but it's one of my reasons for giving up on Linux as a desktop several times and going back to Windows which I otherwise hate. Windows does have the best support for the largest range of languages and writing systems.

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:Fix how it handles tabs

[Guspaz]

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

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that extensions are supported, there are a few out there that provide an alternative method. In general, they usually provide a button on the toolbar which, when clicked, opens a dropdown listing of your open tabs.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[diamondsandrain]

Damn, Chromium is broken. I just realized that I reinstalled Slackware but I haven't set up the libraries the way chromium wants them set up yet. I will have to check on that later. I didn't realize there were extentions to change that behaviour. This might change everything. Unless they are not available in the chromium build. Chrome is only available on deb and rpm and the community supported page didn't list a Slackware version either. Funny enough, I thought Microsoft had the best implementation of tabs. When you open up a new tab it opens up right next to the tab that you opened it from. That way tabs that are from a similar source are all grouped together without having to fiddle with moving around tabs.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[Anders]

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.

No, actually the right way is to use vertical tabs, like Opera lets you do.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[AngelofDeath-02]

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 addition to tabs. If I search for one thing, I'll have a FF window open and it'll contain all the tabs related to this, and another window with whatever else I'm doing. it seems like you don't.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[diamondsandrain]

Vertical tabs? How does that work? Seems like Opera is always ahead of the game anyway. Maybe I should be giving that a try. Last time I seriously gave opera a go was around version 4 I think.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[EvanED]

Additionally when closing a browser, I close it because I'm done with whatever's in it.

That's not always true. I close the browser because I need to reboot; I close the browser because I want to free up the memory; I close the browser because I want to shut off the computer; I 'close' the browser because it crashes; I close the browser because some plugin acts up (on Linux, I had "problems" with Flash after a few hours of use). In all of these cases, I am not done with whatever I had open, and will want to continue to use those tabs when I start it up again. What I almost never do is close the browser because I'm done with everything.

In addition, I basically have a browser basically persistently open, thus the startup time doesn't matter. (I suspect this could be a usage difference.)

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[diamondsandrain]

Its just like when KDE saves the programs that I have open so the same programs open up again when I restart KDE. Its a convenience thing. If I am going to spend the time opening up all the same programs/tabs again then I am going to be annoyed that they were all closed at the end of my last session. There are quite a few pages that I like to visit/refresh on a regular basis, including slashdot, and I wouldn't want to have to open up everything again every time the browser opens. Yes, there is a performance hit on startup but I take that as a small price to pay for everything just being there. Also, I keep open stuff that I deem not quite worthy of bookmarks that I still would like to see again. Kind of an, oh yeah, reminder that I have something to do associated with it. These things would be lost and I wouldn't likely remember them again. I realize that I could be bookmarking groups of tabs, but I like this better. You can still do that right?

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[oatworm]

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.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[SlashBugs]

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 pattern is to run a few searches and open up all the likely-looking articles in new tabs, then screen them for the articles that I actually have access to. Finally, when I have the relevent articles for the points I want to write about (10-30 tabs), I start reading them one by one. When I get to the end of the day I need to shutdown the computer but don't want to lose all my latest searching/screening results. I could store them as favourites but I'll probably never need 99% of them again; saving the session is ideal as it'll remember all the tabs, what order they were in, where I'd scrolled to and which one I had open. It's perfect for the way I work, analogous to leaving my textbooks, printouts and notes open on my desk for the next morning.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[Anders]

Vertical tabs? How does that work? Seems like Opera is always ahead of the game anyway. Maybe I should be giving that a try. Last time I seriously gave opera a go was around version 4 I think.

How it works? By running the tabs down the side. That gives you room for maybe 30 tabs, and they are always readable and never change position. With widescreen monitors, that's the only thing that makes sense (though it will obviously take a little getting used to).

Firefox extensions like Tree Style Tabs will give you vertical tabs as well.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[Kira-Baka]

There is a slackbuild for chrome here.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so you know, you are a nightmare user. You cannot actually use 40 browser windows. Yes, this makes you a tiny minority in a way that is insignificant to UI designers.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[diamondsandrain]

Ah, awesome. I thought I had already checked the slackbuilds site since I use it for quite a few other applications. I guess I overlooked it. Much appreciated. I have installed something to handle the tabs. Looks like they have an extension to open previously closed tabs as well. I don't use that too often in Firefox but it would be missed as well. This changes everything. I will have to give Chrome a go.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[Narishma]

You don't need an extension for that. Just right click on a tab or on the tab bar and click on reopen closed tab.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[Guspaz]

Actually, you can just hit CTRL-SHIFT-T, the same shortcut as other browsers like Firefox that have a re-open-closed-tab feature.

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[KnownIssues]

I usually have at least 15 tabs open at any given time. This can swell to 30 or 40 at times.

Dang, that's a lot of porn!

Re:Fix how it handles tabs

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox's current tab behavior is *the* reason that made me decide to stop using Firefox when 2.0 came out. I used to have 15 to 20 tabs open very often when I used Firefox 1.x. I found 2.0 unusable because navigating to tabs that disappeared to the left or right was painful. And when I middle clicked on a link I couldn't see a tab being opened and so wasn't sure whether I clicked the link or not.

chromium

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the chromium builds from the openSUSE:Contriib repository. It is compiled from source and uses many of the system libraries inistead of statically compiled ones. It also uses the system browser plugin directory and has no problem using flash. Also, chromium doesn't contain usage data gathering like chrome does.

oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think with all the cool shit on Linux it would be better than the Windows version. I'm sure it could have been done in ruby in like 1 hour.

It's a beta?

[selven]

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.

Re:It's a beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for one, the javascript on eBay doesn't work worth a shit. I'm sure there are other sites that are the same way. As long as major sites are fundamentally broken, it's unlikely it'll come out of beta any time soon.

Re:It's a beta?

[fr4nk]

It's probably the same as with GMail and other Google services: they stay in beta for years so Google doesn't have to officially support them.

A Mixed Review For Google Chrome On Linux

[omar.sahal]

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.

[headkase]

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.

Re:Mostly good here.

[mutube]

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)

Re:Mostly good here.

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually installed Chrome because firefox was doing this to me under Ubuntu Karmic - yeah it's dead annoying

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 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?

chrome on windows first

[poached]

Chrome has it's share of issues on Windows too.

Using Chrome dev 4.0+, slashdot scrolls very slowly when browsing with the weird slider bar at top (as guest). No problem in FF.

I also experienced several crashes, and it sorely needs a bookmark tree or side panel.

A lot of the extensions didn't work as advertised.

It's definitely a work in progress like it warned.

Getting Flash to Work

[Kelson]

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.

Re:Getting Flash to Work

[Enderandrew]

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

Re:Getting Flash to Work

[Hel Toupee]

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.

Re:Getting Flash to Work

[Simetrical]

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.

Did you report the bug?

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.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[__aamnbm3774]

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.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[eqisow]

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:Nothing but praise here

[Gerzel]

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.

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:Nothing but praise here

[Pieroxy]

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

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:Nothing but praise here

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to what KlaasVaak mentioned, I would also cite "security" as a concern, as AdBlock Plus also blocks javascript and flash from blacklisted sites.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[Enderandrew]

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 it is apparently fairly unstable, and extensions are completely broken at the moment.

Someone could take the proper Adblock code from the Iron fork and submit it as a patch to the main Chromium tree and see what happens.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid flashplayer has worked in chrome unstable builds on my linux box for several months now, before they added support for nsplugins i would use it over firefox sometimes, but now i just use firefox and flashblock

Re:Nothing but praise here

[RLiegh]

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.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[xeoron]

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 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)
4. it would be nice to be able to see webpage titles better
5. arranging plugin button locations would be nice-- something like how FF does it under customize tool bar mode.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[DrBoumBoum]

Use privoxy for all your browsing, in all browsers, on all architectures. Problem solved once and for all.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[similar_name]

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 a 1.3 ghz AMD Athlon with 1.5 gigs of memory and the speed difference between Chromium and Firefox or even Opera is very noticeable.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[Runaway1956]

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 site you're trying to load.

I know - since much of the world has fiber optics, most site developers simply don't CARE that loading their page takes 3 minutes in the less developed world. Believe me, I don't use their site, if I can't block the garbage.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[vtcodger]

***I know - since much of the world has fiber optics, most site developers simply don't CARE that loading their page takes 3 minutes in the less developed world.***

It's not just the less developed world. Broadband penetration in the US is substantially overstated because of some simply awful metrics used by the FCC. Basically, if there is even one high speed line anywhere in town, the town is counted as having broadband. An awful lot of rural Americans have a choice of dialup -- probably at about 30K (rural phone lines often are noisy) -- or satellite with latency.

Even the FCC admitted 18 months ago that their numbers were "Stunningly meaningless". http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080319/164249588.shtml

IMHO, the lack of intelligence/concern for users displayed by web page designers and others in our communications infrastructure borders on astonishing.

I do not have a dog in this fight BTW as I have access to both DSL and cable. But there are people a ten minute drive from here who do not.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[Terminus32]

I'm sticking to Kazehakase in the meantime, but I was quite impressed with Chrome! Even faster than Swiftfox, which I used previously!!!

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.

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.

Is this a FireFox issue? I've never experienced anything like this with other browsers, even if there is a slow ad (but "usually" "very very long time to load" is so far from my experience) it does absolutely not prevent browsing the site immediately.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with privoxy (or a hosts file) is that they leave ugly "holes" in the pages. Adblock Plus not only stops the ads from loading. It also "cleans up" the page layout. AFAIK, no proxy can do that (I'd love to know if I'm wrong).

Sure, Chromium is incredibly fast, but as long as it doesn't offer EXACTLY the same functionality as Adblock Plus, I'll stay with Firefox.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[Zontar The Mindless]

No problems playing my favourite Flash game using Chrome on 64-bit openSUSE 11.1. IIRC, all I had to do was copy libflashplayer.so to /opt/google/chrome/plugins, chown to root, and restart the browser for it to work.

(Would-be down-modders: If you don't want to play, then you don't have to follow the link, okay?)

Re:Nothing but praise here

[MBGMorden]

Some people have monthly bandwidth caps. People using cellular Internet for example are limited to 5GB per month on most plans (and there are some places where cellular or dialup are pretty much your only options).

Now, banner adds certainly won't take up *MUCH* bandwidth, but with only 5GB per month I'd certainly be cutting out any and everything I could.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[Runaway1956]

Precisely. I'm in Rural America - the less developed world - and the BEST that I can get is 1 MB DSL, which I can't afford to pay for. My phone bill is $75/month with the 375k that I do have! Little more than two years ago, I didn't even have access to that - it was 56k dial up, that on a really good day gave me 47k. So, my memory of waiting as much as 5 minutes for a page to load hasn't faded. Many many times, I just decided that I didn't really need to see the page, and canceled it.

Even with my ten-times faster DSL, I cancel pages from time to time. Latency is no better now than when I had dial-up, but once the page begins loading, it really is 10 times better - and simply not good enough.

Designers should be aware, if it takes more than 30 seconds to load your page, I'm just GONE. I'll not reward your incompetence and lack of consideration by browsing your site. WHATEVER you are offering is available elsewhere, and Google can find it for me.

Re:Nothing but praise here

[RLiegh]

I haven't used anything other than mozilla/firefox in so long, I couldn't really say. But my guess would be that since the issue that I come across seems to be related to getting a network response from the ad server. I'm not a browser guru, so I simply install adblock plus, import my block list, and forget about it.

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.

Google Chrome is already a good browser.

[miffo.swe]

I run Google Chrome 4.0.266.0 on Debian Lenny and my experiences so far has been very good. Plugins in general works just fine, even flash.

I really dont care for "integrated" apps. I want an application to do what its supposed to and do it well. The only thing important is to be able to export stuff in a readable open format. Chrome is by far the best browser i have ever used and the worst thing that could happen to it is if it becomes Gnome/KDE/windows-ified like firefox or konqueror.

Once enough people gets their eye on Google Chrome/Chromium i think both Firefox and IE is in for a ride. Especially on Linux since mozilla seems to view Linux as a sideshow project nowadays, atleast for a bystander. I mean, after this time shouldnt it atleast keep systemwide settings in /etc/firefox?

Chrome + Karmic or PCLinuxOS

[psbrogna]

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.

Re:Not Chrome's Fault

[Enderandrew]

How is this not modded Troll or Flamebait?

Chrome largely looks the same on Windows and Linux. Firefox used to, but Mozilla has been working to make Firefox on each platform look more integrated.

I happen to believe KDE 4.3 looks as good as any desktop on the planet. There are plenty of great looking Linux apps. I say that as a guy who spends 90% of his time in Windows between my two jobs, and runs both Windows 7 and openSUSE at home.

RSS in Chrome

[John Whitley]

It's worth noting that RSS support is an extension for Chrome, 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:RSS in Chrome

[John Whitley]

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 for other flags and a handy hack to make Chrome/Chromium start with the desired flags enabled via its app icon.

Re:RSS in Chrome

[eqisow]

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.

Re:RSS in Chrome

[Rich0]

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!

wonder how the quality

[Threni]

> I wonder how the quality of Google Chrome OS will be, especially if it's based on Linux and Google Chrome."

I don't wonder. It won't be based on any Linux - it'll be based on THE linux build which everything will have been developed for and tested against. How it works on $LINUX_DISTRO_193823 is neither here nor there.

Distribute glibc then ...

[Bananenrepublik]

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.

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: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:Distribute glibc then ...

[fruey]

It's been done before, depends what you need from the library : http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/, http://www.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.

Re:Distribute glibc then ...

[MBGMorden]

Sorry to sound a bit "curt", but honestly, why don't you just develop your application using something like Intel's Linux compiler? Yes you'd have to license it, but then you'd be free to distribute your code as you see fit.

You can't have your cake and eat it to. Part of using the GPL libraries and code is a social contract. It's provided free to you because it's expected that your work comes back to the community to use. When you try to start looking for ways around that then you're ignoring the reason that code was given to you in the first place.

All in all it sounds like your company would have been better served by commercial development tools.

Re:Distribute glibc then ...

[pclminion]

Sorry to sound a bit "curt", but honestly, why don't you just develop your application using something like Intel's Linux compiler?

I don't see how that would solve the problem, since we'd once again have to distribute the runtime. I didn't even know that ICC supplied its own runtime -- is that even true?

We weren't trying to weasel our way around license restrictions. We would have been happy to distribute a trimmed runtime and provide source for it, had it been easy enough. I TRIED.

We made open source contributions on multiple occasions. We found bugs in FreeType, fixed them, submitted patches. We found bugs in Leptonica, fixed them, submitted patches. We made enhancements to jbig2enc which were submitted back. During my last year there we took the plunge and paid $20000 for a commercial license to use xpdf in our product. We found that the error handling wasn't quite how we liked it, so we provided Derek with some suggestions and code, which he reworked in a way he liked a bit better, and put it into xpdf. You get the picture... We were trying to make profit from OUR technology, not by screwing over open source developers. Isn't this the way everyone wants it to work? Aren't we allowed to make profit somehow?

Re:Distribute glibc then ...

[Ant P.]

You might've been interested in eglibc instead, which supposedly fixes all the interdependency crap so you can compile it out.

Re:Distribute glibc then ...

[Sir_Lewk]

If you are not developing Free software, then you do not always get to receive all of the benefits of Free software.

Difficult concept, I know.

Fedora 11 and Flash works here...

[Rick Richardson]

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.

Re:Fedora 11 and Flash works here...

[KiloByte]

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.

Re:Fedora 11 and Flash works here...

[EvolutionsPeak]

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.

Re:Not Chrome's Fault

[lytles]

Linux is the shit.

there - fixed that for you. google chrome runs great on ubuntu 9.04 - quick startup, fast page rendering, fast switching between tabs, and flash works fine. i've had a page crash, but never lost the full browser - usually have 5-20 tabs open. chrome's "developer tools" are good - firebug is better for many things, but the developer tools are much less intrusive, don't slow down page loads nearly as much. the two tools compliment each other well

in short, chrome is a big improvement for me ...

OpenSUSE is NOT Linux

[viraltus]

In Ubuntu works great for example and the incompatibility with KDE is kinda a good thing.

Re:OpenSUSE is NOT Linux

[thatkid_2002]

Why am I replying to a troll?

Re:OpenSUSE is NOT Linux

[ZosX]

you must be new here.....

Re:OpenSUSE is NOT Linux

[thatkid_2002]

You must be retarded...

Why is OpenSuSE not Linux? In general it is less buggy than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the mother of all buggy distros. I'm not looking for an argument because I have too much proof to be able to lose my argument. OpenSuSE has one of the best KDE4 implementations there is (perhaps second only to KDEmod in Arch Linux) so the poor KDE integration is not their fault; they have done everything possible on thier end. Google was silly to use GTK, I really can't think of any reason why they used GTK besides "Ubuntu uses Gnome".

incompatibility with KDE is kinda a good thing.

1995 called and left a message: "KDE is now free software". Funnily enough KDE is not much less popular than Gnome which I suspect is largely to do with Ubuntu's popularity. I don't know what would inspire you to suggest that not having compatibility is a good thing. Maybe you should consider a career with Microsoft.

Full Disclosure: I am a Fedora fan, not an OpenSuSE fan.

Re:OpenSUSE is NOT Linux

[ZosX]

I think you meant to respond to the GP. I think you missed my failed attempt at being humorous at the expense of your question "Why am I responding to a troll?" and your user #. You asked the question, after all. And since I am a retard, I thought I should point out that opensuse is not linux, nor is fedora or any other distro. Linux is the kernel. The linux kernel. In theory you cold take any kernel and swap it in and recompile your system tools (GNU) on top of it and have yet another unix lookalike. Richard Stallman would also prefer if you would start referring to Linux as GNU/Linux, and hey, why shouldn't we give credit to the organization that pioneered free software?

Also, I fail to see what is broken with compatibility in windows? Sure your Windows 9x code might not run all that well, but you can always run a VM if you really need that special app. Anything written post windows 2000 seems to work pretty well for me in windows 7, barring the odd utility that has unsigned drivers or whatnot. 10+ years of compatibility is pretty good if you ask me. Have you ever even tried to compile code against newer versions of GCC? It seems like they break libstc++ compatibility with every release. For someone like me who knows next to nothing about compiling with GCC it is kind of maddening to keep coming across code that won't compile.

Awwww shucks. Why am I responding to a troll?

Re:OpenSUSE is NOT Linux

[thatkid_2002]

OMFG. You are right - I too correct people for saying Ubuntu is Linux all the time. You caught me out there, though it did seem that you were implying that Ubuntu WAS Linux where as SuSE wasn't.

I just guessed that your gripe with KDE was that once upon a time it was built upon non-free software, judging by your # I thought you were one of those old fogies.

I'm not really following your argument about compatibility though. KDE is used by a large group of users - hardly a "minority" so I really can't see any reason why KDE should not be supported to the same standard as Gnome.

Re:How it works

[Anonymous Coward]

If Windows doesn't support an application and Linux does, Windows has a problem.

Can you think of an example? The majority of your Linux apps are free, so a Windows binary tends to get built as well.

Re:Not Chrome's Fault

[Hel Toupee]

Psshhh... ultra-stable? 9.10 is the worst distro Ubuntu has had since I started using it back at Fiesty (7.04). I'll give you one example -- Upstart. Upstart is absolute crap. It tries to do away with a convention (Init) that has worked for years, and is standard across many distros, and replace it with one that was never ready for prime-time. They didn't even get the script for frackin' X right -- they had to push a patch through to stop upstart from constantly restarting X if, for some reason, your configuration was bad. That really pissed off those of us that had intel on-board graphics that made the driver Karmic shipped with poo itself.

Chromium daily PPA on Ubuntu wins

[David Gerard]

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

Did you try the tarballs?

[Sits]

I use a Chromium nightly tarball 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.

how to enable flash

[Anonymous Coward]

to use flash on linux create a plugins directory inside chrome install dir and copy the so library from firefox plugins dir, note that you should use 32 bit flash if install 32 bit chrome or 64 bit if it the case now modify the shortcut to chrome to run with --enable plugins it should run fine now.

Re:How it works

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's faster

[British]

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.

Re:It's faster

[Anonymous Coward]

You're running a browser on your server? o.O

Just Like Firefox,

[Youngbull]

chrome has rss support through an extension.

Chrome works great on OpenSUSE 11.2 actually!

[__aakdpj1217]

I think you just fail completely at using linux. Why? Well because I'm on OpenSuse 11.2 and have Chrome running. As a matter of fact I'll provide you a picture to prove I'm 11.2, using latest Chrome and w/ working Flash, just so you don't think I'm a troll. As a matter of fact I think this Slashdot news post is from a troll anyways. http://i45.tinypic.com/23m770w.jpg

This is a review?

[binford2k]

I mean, seriously, this looks like the author stuck a pencil in his ass and poked it at the keyboard a few times. Did anyone read it before voting it to the front page?

Worked great for me

[tgetzoya]

I use Chrome on both Windows and Ubuntu 9.10 and I haven't had a single problem on either. I use a 5 year old laptop as my everyday computer and FF loads so slow it drives me mad; Opera isn't much better. Chrome loads so fast it feels instantaneous. Once I installed the flash plugin from adobe for FF, it was available for Chrome as well. I'm not much of an extensions guy, but everything that is in a default Windows install is there in Ubuntu as well so that works fine for me.

As for integrating with KDE, why not just use Konqueror? Both are Webkit/KHTL browsers.....the only thing you're going to get from Chrome that you won't from Konqueror is a gtk based Webkit browser as opposed to a KDElib based one. I'm sure there are some other differences between WebKit and KHTML but it really just comes down to the UI

Chrome for Gnome/gtk based gui and Konqueror for KDE makes enough sense.

The lack of RSS is just stupid.

Re:Worked great for me

[Macka]

AFAIK Webkit isn't the default on Konqueror, and there isn't an obvious way to make it so. I tried it recently and was only able to switch to webkit after I'd already loaded a page with khtml, and it didn't remember the change either. If I clicked on another link then the window went back to khtml again. khtml won't render Google Wave so if you're a Wave user then konqueror is a really bad choice. I remember I also stumbled on some other sites that broke badly trying to use KDE's webkit. It's a shame as webkit in konqueror is both faster and the rendered results look better than using khtml. Eventually I gave up trying with konqueror and went back to Chromium. It's non integration with KDE though is real pain (having to cut media URLs and paste them into kaffine all the time) so I've switched back to using Gnome again.

As for RSS, as many have pointed out, a Google RSS extension is just a couple of clicks away. It's adding shit like this into the browser by default (and creating bloat) when only a minority of people want to use it that way that's stupid. I'd rather use Google Reader.

gmail errors

[strikeoncmputrz]

When running chrome on my ubuntu box, gmail throws more errors then my first java app. Anyone else encounter this?

Doesn't play nice with some window managers

[Anonymous Coward]

I found the experience to be pretty similar to Chrome on Windows, which is pretty good, but there's one annoying bug keeping me from using Chrome. In true fashion of the readers here, I will use this time on Slashdot to complain about it while simultaneously not bothering to investigate if it's a known bug or if it's now fixed. :-)

I was a bit frustrated that, at least with WindowMaker, Chrome both presents its own window decorations, and leaves it having a title bar from the Window Manager. Then, for some windows, like Preferences, it does not draw its own decorations. WindowMaker can let me set whether or not to draw decorations, but every Chrome window has the same name string, so WindowMaker is unable to dintinguish between the windows which Chrome draws decorations for and the windows for which it needs to have the WM do this. I can get WM decorations in all windows or none, but not on a per-window-type basis.

I'd look into seeing if others have hit this, or look into the source and go about fixing this myself, but thus far I've been busy with other things...

Extensions

[Midnight Thunder]

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 to bite you at some point in time.

My current gripe with the Firefox extensions is that there is no way to work out which one is causing my performance issues, beyond a slow and systematic remove and add.

It's splendid

[frambris]

I have been using it almost exclusively for a couple of weeks now and I really like it. My internet-bank is the one thing that does not work 100%. GMail is so fast that I have switched from Thunderbird to using GMail in Chrome.

Wow!

[gbutler69]

You sound like a complete dumb-ass!

No x64 Chrome plugin for Gears

[omkhar]

I'm running F12 x64 and I downloaded the Chrome beta. Why hasn't anyone pointed out that the lack of an x64 Gears plugin is rather silly?

Re:No x64 Chrome plugin for Gears

[Macka]

I'm running Chromium on F12 with an older x86-32 box and I don't think gears is available for me either (wasn't last time I checked). Gears is going end of life very soon anyway I think as offline functionality is going to be included in the browser.

Piss poor reasoning in the summery

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So the fact that you were unable to make the beta version of chrome work on an as-yet unsupported linux distro means you assume that the authors of chrome won't bother to make a supported release work on their own linux distro? I was going to write a list of ways you might reasonably come to this conclusion, but it is so much easier to simply point out that you are an idiot.

Media production software

[steveha]

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?

I want to learn how to use this sort of software. I have read some positive reviews of Ardour, so I'm interested to hear what you don't like about it, and what you do like. What do you usually use, if not Ardour? And whatever you use, does it run okay on WINE?

And, have you looked at Ubuntu Studio?

http://ubuntustudio.org/

steveha

Re:Media production software

[Ethanol-fueled]

I'm a relative Linux noob coming from Cubase on Windows. Switching from Cubase to Ardour is a lot like switching from Photoshop to Gimp - Ardour is still pretty good, but it dosen't include any plugins and installing plugins is unnecessarily difficult. You can run VST plugins in Ardour at the cost of stability and a custom-compile. I had problems with installing the Ubuntu studio from the ISO (It's one of those primitive BIOS-style installs and different steps failed multiple times -- what the fuck?) so I installed vanilla 9.10 and apt-get'd Ubuntu-studio. I have no desire to try Cubase on WINE.

The Linux setup is much more modular. My Windows setup required only Cubase and a few of its plugins -- it was self-contained -- but my Linux setup involves setting up Jack, Ardour, and Hydrogen to work with each other(which is not difficult). I am currently having problems with on my laptop with a built-in mic because the mic's input is summed with the other input and there is no way to differentiate and disable the laptop mic without unsoldering the mic and shorting the leads. The setup works out of the box, but do not try to mess with the ALSA driver or you may bork your audio.

Hydrogen, the drum machine, can be synchronized with Ardour via Jack transport. In Cubase, you'd set the time signature(3/4 for example) via the transport bar and everything would be setup and synchronized. To set a 3/4 time signature in Hydrogen, you have to set size and the resolution to 4T - shit like that is proof that no musicians were involved in the development of it. Ardour is basically a glorifed WaveLab or Soundforge while Cubase is a whole production suite. I haven't yet tested my USB audio interface but I've read that it works with Ardour. I've got much more tinkering to do before I decide whether or not to go back to Cubase.

Hope that helps.

Re:Media production software

[macinnisrr]

Ok, as someone who used Cubase as my first foray into recording, I can understand your confusion. However, things on linux work much more like real hardware, so to anyone besides you and me, who has used a tape machine or hdr, with a console, outboard effects, and a patchbay, the Ardour approach is much more sensible. Much like the way a beginner guitarist will want an all-in-one amplifier with effects, reverb, and several channels, whereas a seasoned pro used stompboxes, rackmounted processing and a dedicated power amplifier, this is the difference between a studio suite like Cubase and a dedicated editor/mixer/recorder like Ardour. Check out the plugins available at linuxdsp.co.uk or google search for the invada plugins if you need something with a fancy gui. Otherwise, the plugins included with ubuntustudio-audio-plugins in your standard repos are sure to have all the functionality you need (although they're not necessarily user-friendly, as a trade off though, the ladspa effects are generally quite system-resouce light, so you can use more than in a Cubase VST type setup). As for your issues with hydrogen, I don't really understand. When you use a piece of software like fruity loops or reason (i've never programmed drums in cubase), you must use a loop that's four beats long. To make a 3/4 beat in hydrogen, just change the pattern length to 12. The reason this is way more useful is in the case that you're making a song with one patter at 3/4, another at 4/4. and so on. Sure, it's a little bit harder to wrap your head around if you're only using one type of beat for a song, and you only use either 4/4 or 3/4 for any song you do, but for anyone looking to get truly creative (hence, anyone with moderate to advanced musical training), the complexity you can achieve with such a system is absolutely necessary.

Re:Media production software

[steveha]

Thank you for taking the time to write a nice long answer to my questions. I appreciate it.

I hope you are able to work out your Ardour issues. If not, you might want to look into running Cubase under VirtualBox on your Linux computer; I have been generally pleased by how seamless and bulletproof VirtualBox has been in my testing. (But I haven't tried anything like Cubase; if it does realtime USB, that would be far more serious than anything I have tried.)

steveha

Re:Not Chrome's Fault

[ZaphDingbat]

Next up for Linux, media production software.

Sweet, that's what I'm working on.

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.

Chromium rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't even read the review, but from the sounds of it, it sounds completely oppositie from my experience. I've been using chromium for a while now and it works flawlessly. Haven't had one crash or issue, and flash works fine, and it is significantly faster than firefox. My only complaint is that if you load an xml document it doesn't display it nicely like firefox does.

Insufficient cookie management and I want NoScript

[jthill]

The cookie management is completely primitive. I don't want much - I tell FF to force everything to session cookies with a whitelist for perma-cookies and a blacklist for scum like 2o7. Chrome won't do any of that. Kiss your privacy goodbye.

And I want NoScript or something reasonably like that.

The rest of it just rocks — I really really want to use this browser — but those two are showstoppers. I don't like handing over control of my browser to just anybody.

Aw snap! no good ad block

[pmontra]

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)

AdBlock and other extensions available...

[Anonymous Coward]

...on the latest builds of Chromium.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions

Chrome != Chromium

[feranick]

You are confusing Chrome with Chromium. While the latter is open source and released with the BSD license you correctly reported, Chrome has proprietary parts in it that are not covered by BSD and thus as reported in the TFA, not freely redistributable.

Re:Chrome != Chromium

[feranick]

More about the difference here: http://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/google-chrome-chromium-and-google.html

Could be better (flash works BTW).

[jotaeleemeese]

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 answering the posed questing, most likely Chrome OS will be a great operating system (a conclusion any sane person would arrive at by looking dispassionately at the quality of Google's release software so far).

upgrade away from OpenSUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe OpenSUSE is your problem. It is just so out of date and purely constructed. Chrome works fine in Ubuntu and Gentoo.

Google Chrome on OpenSUSE ..

[viralMeme]

> Personally, I didn't succeed in using Flash Player on Google Chrome beta 1 (I am using OpenSUSE 11.2) ..

Works OK here on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

missing mouse clicks

[viralMeme]

> 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).

On some hardware you may need to tweak your xorg.conf file, don't ask me why ..

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1308754

Problems with embedded fonts

[lee1]

I use Chrome (on linux) as my default browser now. The only serious problem I have with it its handling of embedded fonts, but that might be a problem with webkit.

No on-the-fly Javascript disabled/enable

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one that annoys me the most: In Firefox you have the ability to do this from within the browser.
In Chrome one has to close and reopen the browser (with --javascript-disabled) every time JS enabling/disabling is needed.

Re:Not Chrome's Fault

[s0l1dsnak3123]

Can't they get at least one real musician on their design staff?

Ubuntu has one: He's called Jono Bacon and has his own one-man metal band.

TOS agreement (EULA) is problematic

[KwKSilver]

The TOS Agreement looks pretty intimidating to me. Out of curiosity I pasted it into a blank Abiword doc. Seven pages of single spaced 12-point type. Legalese. If I need a $200-$500/hour lawyer to parse it for me, I'm not going to use it. Period. About five paragraphs in I started to get that deja vu feeling, as if I were at microsoft.com or something. Yuck.

Re:TOS agreement (EULA) is problematic

[jc42]

What I noticed most was the portion at the very bottom:

20.1 These terms in this section apply if you install extensions on your copy of Google Chrome. Extensions are small software programs, developed by Google or third parties, that can modify and enhance the functionality of Google Chrome. Extensions may have greater privileges to access your browser or your computer than regular webpages, including the ability to read and modify your private data.

20.2 From time to time, Google Chrome may check with remote servers (hosted by Google or by third parties) for available updates to extensions, including but not limited to bug fixes or enhanced functionality. You agree that such updates will be automatically requested, downloaded, and installed without further notice to you.

20.3 From time to time, Google may discover an extension that violates Google developer terms or other legal agreements, laws, regulations or policies. Google Chrome will periodically download a list of such extensions from Google's servers. You agree that Google may remotely disable or remove any such extension from user systems in its sole discretion.

In other words, if you install chrome, you agree that chrome or its extensions may read or write any file on your computer, google may update it at any time without telling you to add new features (such as reading or writing arbitrary files), and google may disable anything you add to chrome.

Sounds a lot like you're agreeing that they pwn your computer and can do anything they like with it. Maybe you'd want to make sure that there's nothing on your computer that you wouldn't want copied to google's database. Such as the contents of your .ssh directory, which chrome will be able to read because it's running under your permissions..

Re:Not Chrome's Fault

[macinnisrr]

I've been using Ardour professionally for the last five years. Check out my latest album at dickmacinnis.com. Works better than any other DAW I've used (including cubase/nuendo, protools, cakewalk, etc....). I've only recently started using hydrogen, but the fact that it can be hooked up via jack to any midi sequencer is super great, and even programming within the editor itself is totally awesome. I used to use fruity loops and reason back when I was a windows guy. The unlimited routability of jack applications is not only terribly handy, it's how software should behave (that's how hardware works: you can plug a hard-disk recorder into a separate guitar amplifier). And believe me, I am definitely a professional musician: I have been solely self-employed (making live appearance and merchandise profits) for the last 3 years. All the while using open source software for everything from recording, to graphic and web design, to video production.

Who cares.

[rantingkitten]

Does it still have that godawful "awesome bar" which, through some supernatural force, manages to be even worse than Firefox's? Does it still think it knows better than me why I opened a new tab? Does it still look ugly as sin? Does it still silently install stupid google updaters alongside without asking or telling me?

Nothing it can ever do, in my mind, will make up for these atrocities. Ditch the "awesome bar", give me a BLANK SCREEN when I open a new tab, integrate well with my current DE, don't install anything alongside, and I'll consider trying it again. Until then, Chrome is a complete disaster in my eyes.

Of course, using a browser from a company that has a profit motive for keeping track of where I'm going and what I'm doing seems like a bloody stupid idea to begin with.

You know, nevermind. Even if they get rid of all that crap, I will never use Chrome. They had their chance to make a good first impression and failed, and I've come to loathe every product Google has ever produced past their actual search engine and perhaps their news aggregator.

iRON 4.0.227.0 rings my chimes - using an old ver?

[LandGator]

I've chosen over a dozen extensions on my Pentium-M 1.7GHz / 1GB laptop w/ Ubuntu Karmic, and it's faster than Firefox on my Lenovo SL400 2 GHz dual core Vista slug-in-a-slab:

AntiADS Version 0.3.5 - Simple ADS remover for Chrome.
Bookmark all tabs Version 0.3 - quick keyboard shortcut: ctrl + shift + d
ChromeMUSE - Multi-URL Shortener/Expander Version 1.2.7 - different shortening service providers.
ChromeRIL Version 1.0.0 - Read It Later extension for Chrome
FlashBlock Version 1.2.11.12
French Word of the Day Version 1.2
GetYouTube Version 1.2.6 - Download YouTube video in different formats: MP4 (1080p, 720p, 360p), FLV (HQ, Standard, LQ) and 3GP.
Google Bookmarks Version 0.2 - Load and Display google bookmarks.
Google Calendar Popout Version 1.4 - Adds a calendar button to the menu bar.
google reader full feed Version 0.0.4. - show full story of the current entry
iGoogle tab remover for Chrome BETA Version 1.94 - Hides the iGoogle left navigation tabs and header, so you have more room to browse. Port to Chrome of FF iGoogle Tab Remover 1.9.5
Open Google Toolbelt by default Version 0.2
Torrent Detector Version 0.5.0.8 - Finds the first torrent on this page and adds its link into address bar
TPGoogleReader Version 0.6 - Google Reader on the toolbar.

It seems you might dig dipper

[Anonymous Coward]

I have installed beta version of chrome on OpenSUSE 11.2 and using chrome without any issue both build is x64 and working fine.

In terms of speed improvement, it is far more better than other browser on linux. Also i add Opera to second number in terms of speed.

just to add one more note for extension, it is coming and already see more than 15 pages of extension list.
there is ad blocker in extension.

Love it

[AnibalOjeda]

Ive been using Chrome since the early alpha stages of the Ubuntu build & i have to say i never used firefox ever again. I just can do everything i want to with a browser & FAST!! IS time for FIREFOX to do something about their speed. Is Google can do this im sure they also can..