Chromium-Based Spinoffs Worth Trying

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp takes an in-depth look at six Chromium-based spinoffs that bring privacy, security, social networking, and other interesting twists to Google's Chrome browser. 'When is it worth ditching Chrome for a Chromium-based remix? Some of the spinoffs are little better than novelties. Some have good ideas implemented in an iffy way. But a few point toward some genuinely new directions for both Chrome and other browsers.'"

Comments

Re:F-I-R-S-T

[Overly Critical Guy]

Extra crap like a bundled closed-source Flash plugin?

6 spinoffs

[Osgeld]

6 more goofy names that mean nothing (internet explorer? ok, Netscape Navigator? ok, SRWare Iron, Comodo Dragon, Iceweasel? wtf)

ps here is the print version, so you dont have to wade through 6 ad infested pages

http://www.infoworld.com/print/184923

Re:6 spinoffs

[bonch]

I know, those names are so weird and have no relation to web-browsing.

Excuse me while I use Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

Re:6 spinoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a pretty immature and petty thing to do, but well within their rights.

They had no choice. Debian, being a free distro, couldn't use Firefox's non-free logo. So they didn't, and Mozilla decided to give them the finger:

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project#Origins_of_the_issue_and_of_the_Iceweasel_name :

In February 2006, Mike Connor, representing the Mozilla Corporation, wrote to the Debian bug tracker and informed the project that Mozilla did not consider the way in which Debian was using the Firefox name to be acceptable.

And none with a decent interface.

[Stormwatch]

The interface is what ruins Chrome, how come no one bothers to fix it? A good interface is consistent, internally and externally: the app must belong with the operating system around it. Chrome is alien in any system, it does not have the same window borders, menu bar, or anything else as every other app. That's tolerable from a tiny indie team, like jDownloader, but from a megacorporation like Google this is simply cringeworthy.

Re:And none with a decent interface.

[scialex]

But OTOH it is consistently inconsistent. On any OS/platform you can be fairly certain that if you fire up chrome/chromium it will look almost exactly the same.
Furthermore the fact is that chrome's ui is quickly becoming the standard browser ui. Both IE 9 and Firefox whatever the hell version they are at now look very similar to it.

Re:And none with a decent interface.

[Anonymous Coward]

The interface is what ruins Chrome, how come no one bothers to fix it? A good interface is consistent, internally and externally: the app must belong with the operating system around it. Chrome is alien in any system, it does not have the same window borders, menu bar, or anything else as every other app. That's tolerable from a tiny indie team, like jDownloader, but from a megacorporation like Google this is simply cringeworthy.

Chrome ignoring the system's window decorations to build its own isn't just annoying, it's an accessibility and usability nightmare. If a user is disabled and needs, for example, larger close/minimise/etc buttons, Chrome's custom decorations still draw at their own size regardless of system setting. It also puts the window control buttons in the same place regardless of how your system is set up, so a user with motor control problems is going to be more likely to hit the wrong button by mistake due to the close placement and small size.. Since it ignores colour scheme, too, that means users that need high-contrast themes are screwed there, too.

These problems are especially obvious in KDE, because Kwin allows you to change button placement and decoration size. Even for a user without disabilities, the fact that Chrome and Chromium completely override your settings and does what it wants is a usability killer. I have custom window decoration placement, size, and a dark theme, so Chromium is absolutely horrible to look at by default.

Luckily, Chromium has two useful appearance options under the "Personal Stuff" section that mitigates this. You can choose "Use GTK+ theme" to get your system colours, and "Use system title bar and borders" to put your window manager back in control. No idea if it works in Windows, but it was a huge improvement for me in Debian.

Re:And none with a decent interface.

[MarkRose]

Chrome's UI is not the most intuitive but I like how minimalistic it is, and how it saves the most amount of screen space for the actual task at hand: viewing web pages.

Re:SRWare Iron

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Iron a Scam? Yes

Customization

[Darkness404]

The one thing that keeps me from switching to Chrome is the lack of customization. With Firefox I have the wonderful about:config, but Chrome has no such feature. Even basic settings like moving where the tabs are or fine-grained privacy settings are missing from Chrome and most Chrome derived browsers.

Until Firefox somehow becomes totally unusable or Chrome actually lets me change basic settings, I'm sticking with Firefox.

Re:F-I-R-S-T

[anonymov]

Define "extra crap".

Chrome, includes Flash and PDF plugins, no extra functionality, 82M installed.
Mozilla, no Flash, no PDF, no extra functionality, 38M.
Opera, no Flash, no PDF, built-in news reader/mail, URL-based adblocker and a bunch of other stuff commonly installed as extensions on FF/Chrome - fits it all in 35M

Can you spell "b-l-o-a-t"?

Re:F-I-R-S-T

[Samantha Wright]

Sadly, RockMelt is the most significant entrant on the list. #1 is Chromium, #2 is SRWare Iron (the legitimacy of which remains under debate), #6 is just Chrome itself (brilliant list-padding idea guys; include the official branch not once but twice to pad your pitifully short list), #3 is Comodo Dragon (dumb new UI + hardcoded DNS), and #5 is a Chinese thing that throws in the same old IE Mode and mouse gestures that we've seen a billion times everywhere else. There aren't six Chrome "remixes" out there, there are two.

From now on I think all stories that start with a quantity of items being reviewed, or the fragment "top n", are going to be purged vehemently from my system with a bit of JS. Sad, sad, sad.