Chromium. What is the appeal?
 

First, we all owe a great deal of gratitude to Alien Bob for all he has done for Slackware, so this is not, in anyway, directed at him or his build of Chromium.

That aside, my question is what is the appeal? In a relatively short period of time it has become the most popular browser,

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

I've tried it and I don't particularly care for the interface and it is not as fast as they, google, would like you to believe. Using this link,

http://www.speedtest.net/

I've tested Firefox, Opera and Chromium and Chromium is the slowest every time.

Then there is google's reputation for being, shall we say, "less than honest," about their intentions. I wouldn't trust them any further than I could pick up their headquarters building and throw it and this news story makes one, at least me, trust them even less,

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014...illed-updates/

So, again, why is it so popular? What does it do that other browsers do not?

Thanks.
:hattip:

I also have tried it, and I went back to Firefox in a day. I don't know what the appeal is. I don't even trust it in terms of privacy. Also see a fork of Chromium:
https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

Another problem I had with Chrome / Chromium is that it uses huge amounts of RAM to the point of getting killed by the OOM killer.

I don't think that how popular something is has anything to do with how good or useful it is. I mean take smartphones and tablets as an example.

I use mostly Firefox. I like it. That said, I also use on occasion, Opera, Seamonkey, and Chromium. Sometimes, Firefox just chokes on something and won't render worth a daggone. So I open the others until I get what I need. Some banking sites won't work for me for example.

Being a KDE user, I really just don't use Konqueror. Can't even answer why.

When I have used Windows, chrome always seems faster. I think that is the main reason why people use it. Most people who have a limited knowledge of computer systems seem to either use internet explorer or chrome in Windows, and I can say that at one point when chrome first started catching on I switched because it was notably faster than Firefox on Windows.

With that said I think Firefox has caught up now, but a lot of people jumped ship during a time when chrome may have just been a faster browser. Most people don't distro hop or browser hop, I think the average user just wants a good browsing experience consistently. Along with its speed it has flash built in and a portable version.

For me it comes down to features and a familiar interface. I have been using an alternate browser since Netscape so I have followed the project for a long time and feel linked to it in a sense because of this. Not to mention that Mozilla is truly an open-source developer. Whereas Google has many commercial interests that they might want to use there software to influence people with. I came back to Firefox for this reason and also because I always missed the search engines bar that chrome extensions and plugins could never seem to get right!

I think it comes down to this; If you love true open-source software support it! And share your knowledge and experiences with people. Google is a corporation and chrome tries to run process's in the background even when the browsers closed. I look at chrome as a Firefox copy (as far as interface) with a sleek interface for marketing purposes with flash built in.

Trying to convince people to leave Chrome, would be like trying to get end-users to leave Windows, it just ain't gonna happen. Not in the next 10 years anyway. But with that said its always nice to have another option.

I've also been finding that Chrome for Linux locks up regularly.

I use Chromium and Chrome from time to time, but, I don't really care for them. Firefox is my browser of choice.

Here's another issue with Chrome (and maybe Chromium):
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/01...-injecting-ads

No appeal here for Chrome/Chromium.
Don't care for Google other than their search engine and never could stand the Chrome interface.

I also tried Chrome some time ago and within an hour I had deleted it off my system. Slow and RAM eater.

I love Konqueror but it just doesn't render quite as good as it should/could, so I use Seamonkey and Opera regularly and if I get to feeling a little paranoid I use Icecat.

I took a look at it once because I felt that, as a conscientious geek, I ought to. Ho-hum. Opera has been my browser of choice almost since it was introduced.

I am also wary that, when it comes to "Don't be evil," Google has a blind-spot for Google.

I used Chrome on windows and found it would add 3-4 processes in the task manager.
Also it would consume more memory than Firefox. So I switched back to firefox.
Don't know about chrome but firefox is definitely fast.

Thats why its usage has gone above all.

I installed chromium to try it out. I thought it had a bare-bones feel to it, and an unfinished appearance. I wasn't impressed. I decided to stick with Firefox as my primary browser. I'll still fire up Chromium occasionally when I run into a site that just won't work right with Firefox.

Even though I prefer Firefox over any other browser I've tried, I wish it were not such a RAM and CPU resource pig. I'd love to find a browser that offers good functionality similar to Firefox, but is lighter on resources.

Angry birds

that is about the ONLY thing i use it for
that and if i am out and about on a windows machine someplace i can log in and have all my bookmarks

A can't help but think of this :- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chroming

So maybe people think they'll get high if they use it.

I didn't know you could run apps in Chromium (I'm strictly a Firefox user), so I went to the Google App store and apparently you need to login to Google to download it. Is that standard for everything in the Google App store?

it is free but you do need a gmail account

you can also get a bit creative with the *.desktop file for angrybirds and bypass everything and with a double click have just the game full screen
---- edited to remove MY user id

Regardless of appearance Chrome and Chromium are not the same thing.

Chromium is open source and as such is modified by the groups that supply it to only include what they want it to have. Chromium is the base of Chrome. Chrome is Google's and has all the googleware Google can put in it whereas Chromium doesn't.

Tried it briefly, didn't like it. Satisfied with Firefox (using ruario's latest-firefox script).

The major advantage of Chrome and Chromium compared to Mozilla browsers (Firefox and Seamonkey) is multi-tasking and sand-boxing. Every tab is run as a separate process. If you open many pages in multiple tabs at the same time, Chromium and Chrome will definitely load them faster than other browsers, provided that you have enough RAM. Also, if one of the pages you open crashes, it affects only one tab, not the whole browser. Another advantage for some (mostly corporate) users is, that Chrome (not sure about Chromium, here) renders more pages that have been "optimised" for MS Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8. Also, I can confirm that Chrome (again, not sure about Chromium here) feels a bit faster than Firefox on Windows. But, amazingly, so does Seamonkey (one of my two favourite browsers). On Linux, Seamonkey seems to be way faster than Chrome or Chromium for the pages I visit frequently and as long as I don't open too many pages in parallel.

One of multiple downsides: The technology used by Chrome and Chromium requires a lot of RAM to leverage its advantages. Other downsides have been mentioned already by others in this thread.

I think, it must be clearly differentiated between Chrome, which is Google's next generation spyware, and Chromium, which is also provided by Google as open source. The latter is probably something one might trust in, although possibly at the price of a lack of some "features" (don't know, which, actually, maybe someone else can elaborate on this).

Regarding Opera: Unfortunately the Norwegians decided to abandon their own rendering engine and use Google's engine from now on. They "only" contribute their own GUI, which is currently way behind of what they had to offer in the past, regarding innovative features and capabilities. Competition was to heavy, it seems, and they saw now chance to survive any longer, at less than 2 percent market share, with no indication of significant growth ahead.

gargamel

Excellent way to put it. I like that. ;)

gargamel

This page: http://chromium.woolyss.com/ has some nice information regarding Chromium and how it differs with Chrome (scroll down to the "Features" section).

Eric

Ummm no, granted we are still ramping up how much we commit but we are committing to both Blink and Chromium: http://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/

While we're on the topic of Google: Google lost a lot of credibility for me today.

https://twitter.com/duganchen/status/424970298224431105

I was a long-time Firefox (and Iceweasel) user, but I use Chromium most of the time now. Sometimes I'll use Chrome, but I prefer to use Chromium.

Seems to me that Chromium's faster than Firefox. Certainly seems to start up faster. I could be wrong; maybe it depends on what extensions are being used. Anyway, that doesn't matter much to me because I'm fine with either browser's speed.

I like Chromium's interface better, that's the main thing.

I am not real concerned about Google. Also, I don't dislike Firefox, and I think I'd be fine if I went back to using that all the time. I'm logged into Debian Wheezy at the moment, and I have both Chromium and Iceweasel installed here; in other distros, I usually have Firefox installed even though I usually use Chromium. Whatever.

Thanks, so I stand corrected. I didn't know how actively you contribute to Chromium and/or Blink, I only read some announcements that you were planning on doing so, before. I like Opera a lot in the past, and I always hoped it would get far more acceptance. I also liked M2, which was one of the most innovative mail clients I have ever used. I wish Opera a lot of luck and a much better, successful future. I have a lot of sympathy for small, but innovative scandinavian software companies, like Opera and Trolltech/Digia. :)

gargamel

meh. http://chrome.angrybirds.com/ plays fine in firefox

I've noticed that on several flash only website that my kids go to, Firefox with Adobe is slow, slow! However, that is not the case with PepperFlash and Chrome. I've tried and tried to get it to work with Firefox, but I have not been successful. So, I'm being forced to use Chrome at the moment. This is probably due to Adobe abandoning flash (Linux) and not adding new features.

For all practical purposes, Opera is dead. It has been just about a year since they started putting out their chrome clone, and a very poor clone it is, and they have yet to offer a version for Linux.

Have you tried Alien Bob's pipelight?

http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/pipe...inux-browsers/

I forgot about that! Will need to give this a try.

Chromium is the only browser I can get that will play music from grooveshark's html5 interface. It doesn't feel too smart to have two browsers open, but it's everything I can do in my attempt to avoid installing Flash.

Actually, I just found the workaround. When an individual tab freezes, drag it out of the window and it will unfreeze.

(Still sucks, of course).

Interesting thread.

Every 13 months or so, I'll give Chromium a shot, as Firefox suddenly misbehaves (as of 2 weeks ago, whenever I uncheck "remember me" on the google sign-in page, all my "remember me"s across sites, eg LQ, vanish...hmmm).

Anyhow, the lack of an extension even remotely similar to Tab Mix Plus has me scurrying back to FF within a day and a half.

As of 2 weeks ago, I've begun weaning myself off anything Google. I believe they've truly jumped the shark, and have chosen the path of evil. Can't say we didn't see it coming, tho'....

cheers,

The real deal breaker for me is the lack of tree tabs. There is a tree tab type extension but it's a sidebar (separate window) if I recall. But it has been a while. I like my tree tabs to feel integrated.

That's mainly the fault of the Linux virtual memory manager. You should add swap to mitigate that issue.

Currently, Chrome is the only Linux browser providing the current version of Adobe Flash ("PepperFlash"), which includes hardware acceleration for Intel GPUs and has nVidia support fixed. I never really used Gecko-based browsers (Seamonkey/Firefox), because they are slow.

For everything else I stick with Opera 12. When the latter doesn't work anymore, I will stop browsing altogether and end the WWW era for myself. ;)

Doesn't help, it just slows the system to a crawl. Instead I think they need to work on proper memory management. Firefox doesn't hog all the RAM like that.

Yeah, that's how Linux usually works. But it stops it from OOM-killing your browser.
They? You need to use ulimit(1) to restrict users/applications from allocating too much memory.

I haven't had any such issues with other programs. I certainly could use ulimit, or I could use Firefox.

You are complaining about that you're machine isn't able to handle Chrome RAM-wise. That can happen. Other programs may have lesser system requirements. Actually its not the job the programs to deal with physical RAM limitations, thats what the operating system is supposed to do. And Linux isn't able to deal with RAM shortage very well.

From this week's DistroWatch Weekly feature story:

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?is...140120#feature

Yeah, I guess this is why it's good that we have choices. I feel the exact opposite of Jesse Smith regarding Chromium's and Firefox's interfaces. QupZilla looks promising, by the way -- spent some time playing around with it this week, it's in the Arch repos.

Firefox may use slightly less RAM than Chromium, but it is by no means a conservative consumer of RAM. Quite the opposite. It's a pig. It may not be the biggest pig in the herd (small and inbred as it is), but it is still a pig. And RAM is not all it rapaciously consumes; it's a CPU pig too.

Bottom line, when it comes to resource utilization, there are no good browsers to choose from. Features, features, profligate features. That's all they give us, and to hell with frugality.

I'm going to, in most cases, give up Chrome. On Linux, it still has the best Flash player, but the browser itself is horribly unstable both on CentOS, and on Slackware 14.1 in VirtualBox. I'll be switching to Firefox for now and trying Opera, and saving Chrome exclusively for Flash.

I've also been forced to admit that Chrome isn't the best browser on iOS or Windows either. On Windows, I get unsmooth video playback even when playing MP4 files directly (it's not Pepperflash), and on iOS the integration with other software just isn't as good. I'll be switching to Internet Explorer (which I was amazed to find was the best Windows browser) on Windows, and Safari on iOS.

Have you ever tried my chromium build? I don't understand the talk about instability - I switched from Firefox to Chromium because of its speed and stability...

Eric

I've only tried Google Chrome, packaged using the SlackBuild in /extra.

At a minimum, chromium was built on Slackware, whereas Chrome is a generically Ubuntu-built binary.

Eric

I'm trying out your Chromium build now. It's too early to say whether I find it more stable, but it's noticeably faster.

Firefox 3.x and up are very stable IMO. Chromium was stable when I last tried it, except for it being killed by the OOM killer.

The number one reason NOT to use Chromium is it comes from Google and they think they own all your data. The likelihood that it is gathering information and sending it back to them for "marketing" is way to high for me to trust it.

With Firefox and no script I can turn off the dozens of little Google javascript items embedded in most web pages these days. I wonder if Chromium allows you to turn those off?

I wonder... did you also stop using Google for internet searches? Do you own an iPhone instead of an Android phone?

I think it is useless to pretend that by not using Chrome or Chromium, your online life is safe from data harvesters. This is the world as t is today, and if you embrace it, it can empower you. Just make damn sure that the Internet, and software, and the services running on the Internet using that software, remain free for everybody - and all secret corporate and governmental snooping gets exposed in full. That is the responsibility I feel as part of an Open Source Software and Open Standards community.

Eric

I use DuckDuckGo and don't own and probably will never own a smartphone. If I ever do own one, it will run Slackware ;)