chromium default browser? (Page 2 of 4)

Well, phooo. How to write this reasonably well...

A few week back I was looking at how different browsers are handling font rendering ad here's what I remember from my observations. Also, I'm using the Ubuntu style lcd patches from kodx which make my rendering *slightly* different but I'm pretty sure the basics are still the same. 

Firefox/Iceweasel/Seamonkey Mozilla family- own rendering engine in standard and Debian package, seems to use grayscale at all times.

Chrome/Chromium (webkit but...)- there can be difference between which one you're on at the time but right now both are seem to be using a mix of fontconfig settings and Xfonts and an lcdfilter set, which is kind of wacky. If you have
rgb subpixel rendering on *and* are either using xfce with that set or have an .Xresources file in Openbox set to rgb it always sets the fliter to the lcddefault one. Basically it seems a weird combo of whats in fontconfig and Xfonts or xsettings and it's own extra bit of filter setting. Which may or may not be a desired outcome (looks okay right now on mine if a bit oversmooth). And I think they went offspec with webkit, since the raw engine honors only fontconfig as far as I can tell.

Midori, Arora (webkit)- honors fontconfig, easy.

Opera- if you're using xfce the newer dailies seem to be respecting those settings. If you're using Openbox *and* have an .Xresources file with subbixel or filter handling in it, it might not be working out so well since it's tripping out and cutting off antialiasing, and if no .Xresources using it's own settings. They claim to be honoring fontconfig but the hinting is all whacked out on mine on the current daily on Openbox (and their bug reporting system sucks).  Actually I'm kind of wondering how it's looking for others.

As far as default browsers (just opinion)...

Debian (mothership) is pretty strict on what they consider free and Firefox flavor Mozilla with branding doesn't qualify due to trademark. The small (or big) issue is identification string (which affects site behavior at times though worked around), time to propagate into the various levels of where we're at (stable, testing)  and brand familiarity (though I think that's less of a consideration). If we want to keep it to the base, stick with Iceweasel. It's the Debian control version which is guaranteed (for the most part) to behave with every other thing on a standard install. But it looks like it can get sort of stale at times.

However-  I think a lot of us stick Firefox proper into /opt and do the symlink and reconfig to default dance, which is kind of a pain in the butt but keeps it as up to date as we want it right then and gets rid of those little bit of compatibility issues.

So... I think what it comes down to it whether it's better to keep close to the base, or keep up current. And if Firefox or another browser were to become a default someone has to keep up on the package, like *really* on top of it, with things like security updates. It's probably not quite as easy as it sounds.

What goes in is up to corenominal but in my opinion since I usually just use the browser I get to get the one I want- and even though I'd love to have Firefox proper as a default like Ubuntu is doing it (and updating through Ubuntuzilla PPA stylee), or maybe Chrome though that goes even father off base than Firefox I'm thinking it might be best to stick with Iceweasel for the default.

Last edited by chillicampari (2010-06-21 09:11:04)

I use Chromium (daily builds) on Ubuntu 10.04. If I change a theme to one with the buttons on the right then Chromiums own buttons go to the right, and vice versa. So it basically follows your themes buttons order I hope you understand what I mean, I'm a bit tired.
Here are more details:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/05/chro … -left.html

@chillicampari: The way I always did it was to install Seamonkey with the Mozilla installer, why bother adding a PPA when you can just Help-Check for updates... and get the new version that way? It will alert me when there is a new version, and I don't even have to kdesudo/gksu to update it either, in fact it just updated to 2.0.5 a few minutes ago.

I assume Firefox can be worked the same way, so why bother with a PPA when you would have to wait on the maintainers to update it? I also don't bother running synaptic to check for updates nearly as often as Seamonkey. I mean I assume they would be quick, but browser versions are something I prefer to stay as up to date as possible on.

In any case Chrome looks R E A L L Y out of place on my systems no matter what I do, It just never fits in. I have never had font troubles with it though....

I personally really like chrome/chromium but, haven't had any font issues on my linux machines. One of my work machines (xp) has an issue with fonts and the other (still xp) doesn't...

A couple weeks ago I decided to try to make chrome my default browser on my statler eeepc. Installed chrome and uninstalled iceweasel (or swiftfox, can't remember which I had). I made certain that chrome is the dafault through the 'sudo update-alternatives' command. Still, it has major issues with being the default browser, or maybe it's everything else that has issues with it being the default. A few issues I've come across:

Icedove: links don't open in chrome
Pino: links within messages open in chrome but links within the user description don't
Picasa: Attempting to download a picasa album in chrome will not lead to the picasa program. (On my desktop, clicking the download button in chrome will open firefox which will then lead to picasa and download the album. Oo )
Dropbox: clicking the 'Launch Dropbox Website' on the systray icon will not lead to chrome...

There have been a few other issues but these are the ones that I have dealt with most often. I realize that with some work I could probably get it to work but in my opinion its just not worth the time. Although, I do wonder if chrome integrates better on a gnome or kde desktop, not that I'd leave openbox if it did...

@Chillicampari: I run it from /usr/local/seamonkey IIRC that is the directory the tar.gz file from their site recommends and I have never had problems with needing to be root or anything like that for upgrading. You will have to add the path unless you are lazy like me and just use wbar/kicker to make an absolute path call i.e. the command I run is /usr/local/seamonkey/seamonkey where if you add the path all you need is to just type 'seamonkey' into bash or your menu entry.

I don't have multiple users on my computer, but since nothing is tied to /home it shouldn't be an issue as far as I can see. It does seem to work fine when making remastersys backups. It is sort of frustrating to me that Ubuntu doesn't default to this behavior as Windows Firefox/Seamonkey users expect to be able to check for updates quickly and easily automatically or through their help-check for updates... menu rather then having to wait on maintainers (last time I checked 9.04 repos were on Seamonkey 1.x which is crazy now that 2.0.5 is out and 2.1 is in alpha).

One word of caution following this method icons will be in /usr/local/seamonkey/chrome/icons/default rather then the more logical pixmaps or icons directories.

Ah, I checked all of my settings and I realize now why I can select check for updates while others can't. Apparently at some point I changed the folder permissions, I am the owner of the folder, if you created it as root you may not be the owner, but changing permissions is easy enough. I suppose on a multiuser system you could create a group for the users that had read/write permissions.

Even so this is much safer than running the browser as root, as there is only so much damage that could be done if you gave every user read/write permission to /usr/local/seamonkey but, a piece of malware ran by the browser as root could cause problems. Note root still owns /usr/local/ just not the seamonkey directory.

Last edited by Val_B (2010-06-24 02:35:14)

Ah, perfect! That makes sense. I was having a hard time figuring out how a regular user could update in that space.

I used to manage multi-user systems a while back but now I don't (thank goodness!) and luckily forgot a whole bunch of stuff. But I think both them and I would have been wondering what was up if they were able to update under their accounts and it was successful.

It's probably *pretty safe* but with multiple users updating the same place in the hierachy you might run into stuff like someone updating everyone elses install but if it's co-ordinated - the groups idea got me to thinking and that would have been cool to mess with to allow some users to update it their own departments ahead of a global company-wide (in possibly an easier way). Dang, if we'd only had this conversation a few years ago!

Oh yeah, I've run browsers as root on the job (and off, so I guess for fun *and profit) just to see what happens. I can't remember which one locked up the entire home directory once, whee!

@jpope- well I guess we know now it really does do _something_ right there. Hopefully my advice didn't futz up your install! You should be able to back it out and get back to where you were with an X restart.

@Invictus51 :
use Chromium, it's the same of Chrome, but OpenSourse ... No spyware

Hi

I feel SRWare Iron is an even better alternative. Check out here:

http://www.srware.net/forum/viewtopic.p … 4312b24fbd

It's incredibly quick and lean at the same time ... and therefor i hardly do not use firefox anymore.

Well, I must say, I never knew fonts were such a big deal. Of course, this is coming from the guy that's using the "out of the box" wallpaper/theme combination from Statler - i.e. I don't really care how my system "looks".

From my perspective, I simply got tired of the bloat in Firefox. It takes forever to load. It eats up RAM like crazy. Plus, moving to Statler meant I would have to deal with "Iceweasel" instead of Firefox. I don't care what they say, I'm not comfortable using a derivative that's being passed off as the original. Also, I just don't want to mess with symlinking, updating alternatives, etc.

So, I've given Chrome a try. And, I do mean Chrome. I downloaded the .deb from http://chrome.google.com and ran "dpkg -i". There's been nothing that Chrome fails to do for me. I am actually pleasantly surprised at how well it - functionally - integrates into the Statler system.

• Chrome is the default browser - confirmed that x-www-browser points to it.

• I use Icedove for email (cue the rotten tomatoes for "derivative" hypocrisy). Links open just fine in Chrome.

• Both Flash and Java work fine in Chrome.

• It opens super fast.

I prefer the Firefox plugin for Delicious over any Chrome extension that exists for Delicious. But, that's a minor quibble for me because I don't access my bookmarks all that often. Plus, if I *really* want to use Firefox, I'll just "ssh -X" into my #! 9.04 box and run firefox from there.

So, in summary, I like Chrome on Statler and wouldn't mind if it were made the default browser. But, I'm not going to campaign for it either. I can set it up with minimal fuss and that's just fine with me.

The default fault does suck, but it's easily changed.  I set the fonts to DejaVu and things look rather nice.

Chrome is much faster than Firefox and a lot less resources.  Now that the plugins are coming in for it I started using it pretty exclusively since this last weekend.  I'm liking it, I mean I'm really liking it.

For a minimalistic/lightweight distro like #! my vote is yes, it should be the default browser.