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.

Firefox 4.0b12

I noticed Firefox (Iceweasel) 4.0b12 is in Debian experimental now so I decided to take it out for a spin. I moved my old .mozilla directory out of the way first to get a clean start without any extensions or configuration tweaks.

4.0 is like meeting an old friend again: it's different and yet immediately familiar. 4.0 is noticeably faster for general browsing but it still stumbles badly on the ultimate JavaScript test: Google Wave. 4.0 faired much better than 3.5 did but is nowhere near as good as the Chromium browser.

The Firefox extensions are the main reason that I'm considering switching back. In this area Firefox still blows away Chromium, notably in how well extensions are integrated into the browser. On Chromium, Ad Block Plus is still limited to hiding the ad after it was downloaded and NoScript is still impossible to implement. I was pleased to discover that both worked flawlessly on 4.0.

Overall I was a little disappointed with 4.0. For all the effort that has gone into it, it clearly isn't the Chromium killer I was hoping for. On the other hand, I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with Chromium's quirks lately, so I might still switch back to Firefox.

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?

Chrome

I've been using the Google Chrome browser as a dedicated Wave client for about a week and have been very impressed. Chrome easily beats Firefox in memory usage and performance, which is most useful when using an oinker application like Wave.

However, I won't be switching to Chrome completely for my daily browsing needs, until essential functionality like NoScript are available. Once that happens, Firefox's days are numbered as the main web browser on Linux.