Saturday, May 15, 2010

Chromium

The Chromium browser finally entered Debian sid a few days ago and I've been using it as my primary browser. So far I have no major complaints. Chromium feels faster than Google Chrome for some reason, although I suspect it is just just my imagination as I haven't use Google Chrome all that much. The one thing that I am not imagining, is how ridiculously faster Chromium is than Firefox 3.5.

Chromium has a built in flash player which is enabled with command line switch. The flash player is the only thing that causes Chromium to use a lot of CPU. Since the flash player is still quite new, I'll avoid making any judgements. Poking fun at flash performance is all too easy any way.

I installed some basic extensions, an advert blocker and a flash blocker. There's no extension similar to Firefox's NoScript yet so I've disabled javascript and only enable it for specific sites. This works well for now, but doesn't have the fine control of NoScript, so you can't block specific scripts on a site. It's all or nothing.

A couple of web sites that I use, require a personal certificate for indentification. Chromium currently does not provide a user interface to manage certificates on Linux. You need to use a install a separate command line utility that is detailed here.

After using Firefox for so long, it feels a little strange to be switching browsers. The folks at Mozilla re fighting back so it we'll definitely have another browser war. For now, I'll stick with Chromium.

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