BrnDmp

Why Chromium is now my primary browser

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to include our personal browser histories in the post. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

A personal browser history

My first encounter with a browser was at university somewhere around 1995. All computers had Netscape Navigator installed so that is what we used. After I became infected with the Linux virus (around 2002) I suddenly had choice regarding browsers. Running KDE, Gnome and Xfce I used Konqueror, Firefox (Iceweasel, Mozilla) and Opera. While never really disliking any browser I more or less got stuck with Firefox as my workhorse Internet browser since two or three years with Opera as it’s sidelkick. The main reason being the many wonderful Firefox plugins supported by a vibrant community. Firefox plugins (or add ons) really increased my productivity in no way any other browser did.

But then came along Google with their own browser: Chrome. And we, the chosen few, the cult of freedom, the enlightened, were left in the dark and denied. Google only released Chrome for Windows. How could they?

Luckily now there is Chromium, so we Linux users can also quench our thirst for speed and relief our beloved RAM from the massive Firefox memory footprint.

Chromium

Chromium is the open source project behind Google Chrome. I use the Ubuntu daily build which can be installed via Launchpad. The project is still in alpha status which means not all features are implemented yet.

Speed

Chromiums’ main selling point is speed. Todays dynamic Internet with feature rich we applications is not comparable to yesterdays static html ‘digital brochure’. Modern applications like Googles gmail or Zoho office are heavily using (client side) javascript. Chromium happily serves those applications with it’s brand new and fast JavaScript engine v8. On my Ubuntu 9.04 desktop, I haven’t seen anything faster than Chromium yet. Can’t wait for Firefox 3.5 with it’s rewritten javascript engine to see how it holds up to Chromium.

If you want speed, you gotta go for Chromium.

Usability

Next to speed there are a lot of features which make Chromium really nice to use (speed being a huge usability feature for me):

• The Omnibox: Chromiums address bar where you can enter urls, a search term or both. It’s also intelligent enough to know that, once you visited Wikipedia, it has it’s own search box and gives you the option to search from that box much like Firefox’s keyword search.
• When opening a new tab it nicely shows recently opened and closed tabs as a list or thumbnails
• The status bar only shows up when it has some message to convey, saving precious screen space

To me, stability is productivity is usability. My colleague works with Vista and his box is constantly crashing making the reset button the most often used feature of his computer. My Ubuntu box never crashes providing me a much larger productivity window. The same applies to browsers. Chromium tabs all run in their own thread. That means that if one site crashes, your browser and the rest of your tabs still live on. In Firefox, a tab crash means a browser crash forcing you to restart Firefox. Moreover, each tab running in it’s own thread also means speed as one slow web app doesn’t drag all tabs to turtle speed.

Until now Chromium is going for a clean sheet. Nothing can stop it from being my primary browser. All that’s left is install some plugins, extend the functionality with some add ons and we’re ready to conquer the web. But wait. what’s that? No plugins? No extensions? No add ons? No, not yet. What a shame, Chromium was on the home stretch going for a win but tripped on the last hurdle. For me, reason #1 to love Firefox is the enormous amount of extensions that is available. There’s an extension for everything and everyone. A pluggable architecture makes your application able to tap the power of the Internet: a huge (developer) community enriching your application in ways you could never have imagined. Big minus for Chromium there; big, BIG minus. Google does intend to create an API for extensions but that is not implemented yet. Let’s hope that API comes fast.

Then there’s the privacy debate. Google is loved by many for it’s great search engine, it’s excellent mail application (Gmail) and their break through office apps (Google Docs). All web based, all fast and all free (as in beer). The price you pay is that Google harvests your behavior on the web. I personally don’t care so much. But I can understand the people that do. So, if privacy is a big concern to you, you might want to think twice before using Chromium.

Finally I have to mention the ‘incognito’ browsing mode which doesn’t leave any trace on the computer when you stop browsing. Nice if you have to work on a public computer but I don’t really see the point when using it on your own computer.

If you want ‘plain’ Internet browsing usability you gotta go for Chromium. If you want extensibility, Chromium still has a lot of ground to cover.

Chromium OS

All the rumours of Google OS turned out to be hoaxes. Google is smarter then wanting to battle Microsoft on their own terms. Google first created their own arena with Google search and rich web applications (Gmail, Google Docs). That arena became known under the moniker ‘cloud computing’ and turned the browser in the most important desktop application on any end-user oriented OS. Now there’s a battle Google can win. The browser is the OS of the future. The popularity of netbooks supports this trend and Google understands it.

My primary browser

Ok, so Chromium is not my primary browser yet. Maybe then, I have to rephrase the title of this post: “Why Chromium will be my primary browser”. If they come up with nice add ons and plugins comparable to Firefox, they can count on one more convert. For now, I still use good old Firefox 3.1 with a bunch of extensions as my work horse and I use Chromium to run web apps, most notably Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar.