Chromium vs Firefox?

[John Moser]

On 05/01/2011 11:28 AM, Remco wrote:
> On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 16:36, John Moser<john.r.moser at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Has anyone yet brought up the potential to ship Chromium default rather than
>> Firefox?  At this point it's more advanced methinks, with the only likely
>> complaint being that you can't add NoScript or AdBlock+.  Ubuntu doesn't
>> ship these default anyway; if you want those things, you can get Firefox
>> yourself, as you likely already know what you're doing.
>>
>> For the privacy discussion, see SRWare Iron as a potential source of ideas
>> for changes to back-merge (or options to add).
> "More advanced" is not very persuasive. What are the actual pros and
> cons of Firefox and Chromium? Firefox is twice as popular as Chrome,

Irrelevant.  Firefox is twice as popular as Chrome because it's shipped 
by default in Linux distributions.  Internet Explorer is much more 
popular than either.

I feel Firefox (read:  everyone) has been playing catch-up to Chromium 
lately (like IE was playing catch-up to Firefox an age ago), so there 
are probably fewer pros and cons than I'd like in a well-constructed 
argument.  There are a lot of irrelevant "firsts," like "Firefox stole 
Chrome's UI for Firefox 4" (no menus), "Firefox got the idea to run 
plug-ins and tabs in separate processes from Chrome," etc.  Of course, 
Firefox did the Awesome Bar first, so it goes both ways.  I still like 
Chromium's New Tab default page better than Firefox's (i.e. a blank 
page), and have been waiting for Firefox to copy that.

This is only of relevance if you care about the argument that Chromium 
was built as-is from the ground up, whereas Firefox has gone through 
multiple iterations of refactoring of basic program architecture--like 
OpenOffice.org.  Of course, the argument that the Mozilla codebase is 
and always has been a mess and has been handed through 3 companies and 
multiple programming teams and has had many, many architectural changes 
in place is an ad-hominem fallacy; if you want a real argument in that 
direction, you'll have to do a complete code analysis looking for 
structural flaws.


> and a lot of time was invested in integrating Firefox into Ubuntu.

... what?  Integrating ... what?  I saw the stuff where it can 
automagically call Synaptic, but I assume most of that code is rather 
modular and plugged into a Firefox extension.  Popping it into a 
Chromium extension should be trivial, in theory; actually writing the 
extension (i.e. glue code between all that stuff and Chromium itself) 
would be the only intensive work, which admittedly could be a fair 
amount of work.

Of course, i tend to assume programs are [Business logic]<->[User 
Interface], and rarely consider integrating any business logic into the 
user interface.  People seem to like to emit things and allow them to be 
strung into lists in the UI side, though... (especially of note is 
people who use List UI elements as linked lists, rather than populating 
them from a linked list generated by business logic code).
> There need to be compelling reasons for a switch. That said, I think
> they are going to discuss this topic during the Ubuntu Developer
> Summit. In-person discussions work very well for these kinds of
> things.
>

This is all very true.