The Perfect Browser?

The Chromium browser still has no built-in ability to manage certificates. You have to use command line tools, which isn't really a problem, but it means that Chromium does not work properly on any site that installs a certificate automatically. It's one of those things that makes me wish someone would develop a browser which combines the best features of Firefox and Chromium. That marriage might just be the perfect browser.

Blogger Chromium Weirdness

I use the following HTML/CSS snippet when I want pre-formatted text with an automatic scroll bar if the text is too wide:

<pre style="border-left: medium solid rgb(127, 127, 127); padding-left:0.5em; width:95%; overflow:auto;"></pre>

It does not work with Blogger and Chromium 10.0.648.204 where it always wraps the text instead of adding the scroll bar. It works with w3schools and Chromium. It works with Blogger and Iceweasel 4.0 (and Firefox, presumably). It even works with Blogger's preview and Chromium.

And that is a really trivial piece of HTML and CSS, too. It's a good thing I'm not trying anything complicated. Hey, maybe that's it! Yeah, maybe some JavaScript will fix it! ^__^

Is Chromium Becoming Bloated?

Whoever thought it was a good idea to embed document and multimedia viewers in the web browser, should be drawn-and-quartered, keel hauled, and shot, not necessarily in that order. Unfortunately, this madness will never end.

Google Chrome (and Chromium presumably) will soon get a built in PDF viewer, in addition to the built in Flash player. Suddenly this lightweight web browser is becoming a little bit portly.

Chromium And Firefox Plugins

I needed a Java plugin for the Chromium browser and was very surprised when I found that it can use the Firefox Java plugin. On Debian sid, when I start Chromium like this:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1/ chromium-browser

it automagically detected the icedtea plugin for Firefox. Obviously you need to have the xulrunner package installed as well.

I wonder if any other Firefox plugins will work?

Chromium And Ad Blocking

Advertisement blocking in Chromium isn't as effective as it is in Firefox because extensions can't prevent the browser from downloading and displaying the advert. The best an extension can do, is remove the avert after it has been rendered, which means in the worst case, you will see the ad briefly. While this is better than nothing, it hardly qualifies as blocking the advertisement. For one thing, fetching the advert is sometimes the slowest component when downloading a page. There are other reasons for running ad blockers other than simply hiding them. The Chromium extension API is still new so hopefully this limitation will be removed sometime in the future.

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.