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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."
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?
I thought flash not working is a feature.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
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
-Bob
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.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
"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?
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.
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.
You get plenty of reviews on slashdot by people who never use the device. For example: the Amazon kindle, Microsoft Windows, and girlfriends.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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.
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.
Shh.
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?
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.
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
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
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.
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.
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!
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.
Comment of the year
Feedback is something you write to developers, not something you write in an article on your advertising supported website...
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.
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?