

Chromium alpha for Linux - donaq
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/hands-on-google-chromium-browser-alpha-for-linux.ars

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thristian
Apparently native support for x86_64 is not in the foreseeable future:

[http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/64-bit-s...](http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/64-bit-support)

Guess I'll be sticking with Firefox for a while yet (or Opera, or Epiphany-
webkit, or Midori, or...)

~~~
trezor
I'm running 32-bit Firefox in Windows Server 2008 x64 and I have no issues
with this what so ever. It's stable, working and you shouldn't really need
more than 4GB of memory for a web-browser anyway.

Compared to the minefield of bugs that is Minefield (64-bit FF builds),
coupled with lousy plug-in support, the 32-bit version is a by far superior
option.

I'm not saying you _have_ to run Chrome, as I'm kinda fed up with the hype,
but why would you make lack of 64-bit support a show-stopper for something
like a web-browser? For a DB-server needing massive amounts of RAM I could see
the point, but for a web-browser?

~~~
deutronium
I'd agree with you that yes there isn't a great advantage of a 64 bit web
browser. But 64 bit FF + the 64 bit Flash plugin seems pretty stable for me at
the moment, maybe theres a slight advantage if you play HD video through the
webbrowser.

~~~
ori_b
IMO, a bigger advantage is that you don't have to install 2 copies of all the
libraries.

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ori_b
It's disappointing that they seem to be using their own build of WebKit,
instead of the officially supported WebKitGtk port that exists in Apple's
repository. This means that the development effort is split, and that bugs in
one port won't be fixed in the other.

Google could have contributed to the entire Linux desktop ecosystem by joining
forces with the WebKitGtk team, but instead they went their own way. They
would have benefitted as well, having a mostly-stable and mostly-complete base
to start from, instead of having all these rendering bugs and complaints about
fitting GTK into WebKit.

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mattyb
I'm using it right now. It's quite a bit faster than FF 3.5b4 on my machine.
Options aren't implemented, yet it imported all of my Firefox stuff without a
hitch (I've yet to see this work on Windows for me).

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donaq
I just installed it and I tried this on it as well as Firefox:

[http://grad.icmc.usp.br/~felipc/processing_js/chaostheory.ht...](http://grad.icmc.usp.br/~felipc/processing_js/chaostheory.htm)

I must say that the difference in speed is impressive, even though the score
did not display. Still, not too shabby for an alpha!

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davidw
I got Chromium from the .deb that's available, and it made me install the
msfttcore font package in order to function, which screwed up my fonts. My
guess is that there's a way to make that not happen, but I don't have time to
dig around for it right now. Other than that, it seems like a pretty nice
browser.

~~~
mattyb
If you use aptitude/APT (I haven't looked at the deb in dpkg), the chromium-
browser package doesn't install msttcorefonts/ttf-mscorefonts-installer.
chromium-testsuite depends on them, so you might not want to install that.

~~~
davidw
Cool - what sources.list are you using? Maybe that was the problem.

~~~
mattyb
I'm using Ubuntu Jaunty, so I added

    
    
      deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
    

to my sources.list, then added their key using

    
    
      $ sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5
    

'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install chromium-browser' should do it
for you.

~~~
davidw
Excellent! I guess I was getting it from the wrong place. That one works great
on intrepid too (well, changing jaunty to intrepid).

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edmccaffrey
I understand the organizational differences between Chromium and Chrome--where
Chromium is the open source basis of Chrome--but I cannot find any listing of
the functional differences between them. I tried Chromium on Linux, but its
early state meant that anything different could easily be not implemented.

~~~
dflock
'Chrome' is the Google branded officially released version of 'Chromium' -
which, as you pointed out, is the open source base on which 'Chrome' built.
There is currently no 'Chrome' release for Linux, only nightly builds of
'Chromium' - which can be had here, if you're using Ubuntu:

<http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu>

~~~
edmccaffrey
I understand that; what I haven't found is the actual difference between the
two. Are there any functional differences between Chrome and Chromium (assume
Windows version, since I'm not referring to things missing in an incomplete
port), or is it only a branding thing so that the projects that fork and
extend it don't use something with Google's brand?

~~~
dflock
I'm currently using both on Linux and there isn't really any difference
between them at all, except the icon.

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truebosko
It's fast and slick at the moment but can only be used as a secondary browser.
If you're looking for a slight speed improvement over Firefox 3.0, get the
Firefox 3.5 beta (<http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html>) ..
I've been using it as my primary browser on Ubuntu for about a month and have
had no real issues.

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trezor
I'm using it right now because regular Firefox is dog slow on Linux, something
you really notice on things like low-powered netbooks.

My main complaints so far are that there is no options screen at all and that
font rendering is _horrible_ : ugly and buggy. For instance, horrible is not
shown in italics here and I'm pretty sure text looked better on a C64 running
GeOS than they do in Chromium on Linux.

I can understand the lack of plugin and extension-support so far, it still
being in an alpha state, but I kinda miss adblock plus. Using bfilter trough a
proxy just doesn't do a equally good job.

While I realize it's not a priority for an alpha release the documentation is
AFAIK non-existant. I had to google around and search developer mailing lists
to find out how to set a proxy at all.

It's speedy compared to Firefox, but it clearly shows it needs a lot of work
before it is something I would recommend to people I know.

