It's A Feature, Jim

If you use the Chromium browser, you may have noticed an "Other Bookmarks" folder on the right side of the bookmarks toolbar. Have you ever tried to delete it? Guess what? You can't.

Neither can you move it, rename it, hide it, or otherwise make it vanish from your sight. If you think this is stupid, don't worry, you are not alone. It has been reported (here and here) but Google considers it a "feature" and refuses to change the behaviour. Lovely.

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 Crash

Oh lovely. I actually had chromium browser (Debian package 9.0.597.98~r74359-1) crash the system today. I down graded to the previous package and it seems to be OK. It's very curious because chromium was upgraded two days ago. Why did it take so long for trouble to show up? And there no bug reports yet, so it's not a common problem. Now that is really worrying. The crashy version was a security update too, so now I'm running a version with known exploits. Oh yes, this just gets better and better.

It's so rare for a user application to take down the whole system on Linux. According the logs, the kernel's out-of-memory killer shut down chromium several times. The browser's multiprocess design probably made that harder if all the processes were leaking memory simultaneously, like an OOM wack-a-mole. After the reboot but before the down grade, chromium's behaviour was completely erratic. The plugins kept crashing and disabling them didn't help at tall. I even got the "Aw, snap" error message on the Google search page, which was kind of ironic coming from the Google browser.