Chromium for Xubuntu?

[John Moser]

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Charlie Kravetz
<cjk at teamcharliesangels.com> wrote:
>
> Perhaps the best fit of all would be midori, which is part of Xfce
> development now. Is chromium still in beta? I don't seem to keep up
> with all of these anymore.

That is a lucid, intelligent, well-thought-out consideration.

Chromium is beta 5, I don't know if it's officially production in ANY
version yet though.  Everything's constantly Beta from Google, I think
gmail was beta until like last year?

That said, there are two arguments here.  One is to use the bundled
software for the DE, that being Midori.

The other is to use a best fit solution for the distribution,
including design goals (Xubuntu is a less-intensive distribution using
less RAM right?) and look-and-feel; that means Firefox might fit less
well than Midori or Chromium, and Chromium is a viable consideration.
Given that, we now have deeper considerations to deal with, including
philosophical considerations, technical considerations (feature set,
fitness for a purpose), and political considerations (Chromium, IE,
and Firefox are the top 3 browsers in the world, yes?).

Chromium is a viable option in that second set.  Firefox as well,
since it has GTK theme integration and is a top ranked browser in
terms of popularity.  Personally I think the UI of Chromium fits in
better with XFCE than Firefox, and I think its technical features (low
memory usage, fast JavaScript engine, standards compliance) put it at
least on par.  I think in terms of general popularity and familiarity,
Firefox wins out; though Midori is obviously at the far end of
obscurity.

As for feature set, it's difficult to say.  Chromium has a less than
stellar ad blocker available (it downloads and then hides the ads) and
no support for NoScript or equivalent; it does have a functional
locally-implemented AwesomeBar (I'm looking at SRWare Iron, which has
all Google-communication stripped out flatly), as well as support for
NS plug-ins (flash, gears) run in external processes, and every tab
run as an external process.

Midori has all the standard features-- tabs, extensions, adblock, user
scripts, a search bar, a clean UI-- but nothing spectacular.  It's
viable, but I think Chromium might have a technological and political
advantage, without being too resource heavy or cluttered looking.  I
think Firefox is lagging in some aspects and better in others, but is
too heavy for Xubuntu.