Smoothwall Firewall project

Friday 15 May 2009

Chromium on Linux is getting better by the day

The latest build I have just installed and had a good look around is without doubt the most polished that has been built for Ubuntu. I follow the daily build on the PPA site, and I have also noticed that they have started to build for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala for good measure.

It looks really well put together , and for the first time the options menu item is selectable and working, though there is not a lot you can do with it currently. We also had weird stripped tabs for a while, but they have now been replace again with the correct theme.

The speed is as great as always, and I am really beginning to like the single search bar plus when you open a new tab you get thumbnails of previously selected pages. I'm sure there are plugins for FF that will do this, but it is out of the box on Chromium.

I have no doubt that when this is finally released, Firefox is going to have some real competition and it is going to have to address it's speed issues on the Linux platform. I'm also testing FF3.5 beta, and it is definitely faster than 3.0, but it is not in the same league as Chromium currently on the same Ubuntu 9.04 laptop. FF does win hands down on the installable plugins front, but I have been reading a lot about the API's are being put in place for the same features in Chromium.

I have now switched to Chromium to do my RSS feed reading and forum posting, and once it supports flash I suspect I will be using it considerably more.

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