Chromium/Chrome, everyone’s favourite web browser that descended from heaven to take us by the hand and guide us to the promised land of web browsers (that’s how I look at it, anyway, but I’m insane) has been steadily evolving its Linux port. The latest feature addition? The first signs of native themeing.
Ars Technica has been keeping up with the Linux builds of Chromium, and they found out that the browser recently gained functionality which allows it to blend in more thoroughly with the rest of your desktop. Chromium settled on Gtk+ for its toolkit, and now the browser window will take its appearance from the theme you’ve currently set.
An option appeared in the options dialog that will tell Chromium to adopt the icons and colours of your currently set Gtk+ theme. In addition, you can tell Chromium to adopt the titlebar of your choosing instead of the default Aero-esque variant.
As the screenshots over at Ars Technica show, there’s still a a lot of work to be done on these new features, but it’s a very welcome step in the right direction. Linux fans will certainly enjoy these features which I believe are not available on the Windows version of Chrome. While this isnt’t much of a problem on Vista/7 (the glass colour adapts to your settings), you’re pretty much stuck with the weird blue Aero-esque bar on Windows XP, which just looks plain weird.
This proves that the Chromium team is committed to an optimal user experience on Linux. Rejoice!
Basically you, me, and ten other guys think that way. Don’t understand why, but hey, as long as google keeps it rocking I don’t really care either.
Alas, they didn’t warn me in Sunday School that The Rapture was Windows-only.
But why? OK, so it’s fast. It works. Firefox is slightly sluggish in comparison. The security model seems interesting (ldd shows me that it does indeed make use of SELinux). But no adblock, no Flashblock (not that it needs one, as Flash is unsupported) and no Noscript. Not even HTML5. What’s the big deal? It’s only a slightly faster browser.
People anticipate those are just a matter of time, since the extensions framework is coming together, and WebKit will get to HTML5. Flashblock is already here, via a couple of userscripts:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46673
or
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/45343
The first one has nicer visuals, but misses some elements. I’ve worked around it by adding some of the second script’s code to the first, though it’s probably not very efficient:
http://www.mediafire.com/?1lssf9gedwk
And here’s how to enable userscripts:
http://lifehacker.com/5180010/enable-user-scripts-in-google-chrome
Google will never sanction ad-blocking – what are you thinking? Of course you can do it other ways, but they will always by necessity be third-party solutions at best. And Google will always do all it can to break those solutions.
Yeah, locking yourself in a struggle with your browser’s creator seems like a rational way to go…
Select text and there is “Search google for…” in the context menu. Copy text, and “Paste and go” is in the context menu for the url bar. When you search for something on a site, typing the site name in the url bar and hitting tab will let you do a site specific search. Bookmark bar comes and goes with Ctrl-B, and the status bar goes away when it isnt displaying anything. “Tearing” a tab off of a window and dropping it outside the window creates a new window, dropping it inside an existing window adds the tab to that window. Built in task manager that lets you kill unresponsive tabs/plugins. Built in memory profiler when you want to know what site is eating all your memory. “Speed Dial” page also has a list of frequently used site specific searches, and a list of tabs you recently closed. UI is fantastic, it gets out of your way as much as possible, with nice subtle touches (like the tab animation, or the way the domain is slightly darker then the rest of the url) And finally, the performance is more the “slightly faster”. I have no idea why, but pages seem to render faster, and start time is next to zero.
Now, opera invented a lot of that stuff, and most of it is available through plugins on firefox. However, (in my opinion anyways) the implementation is far better on chrome then I have seen anywhere else. And while (except for the profiler) I literally use all these features multiple times a day, they do not get in your way. Firefox to me is basically a firebug bucket.
Most of those features are in Firefox by default. The task manager and the memory profiler are the only two major things, the rest are minor niceties. “Paste and go” might be nice if you use Windows; on Linux it’s more convenient to middle click a URL somewhere in the browser window, or middle click and press enter in the search box.
Chrome’s UI looks good, as it gets rid of all the standard information you expect to see in a browser (File, Edit, View …), but is it? Perhaps on small screens, like some netbooks, it will benefit from hiding the status bar and the menu bar. Personally, I find the unified URL and search field, with auto completion, very confusing. Then again, I also like high resolution screens.
again, to each his own. I don’t really care if nobody else uses chrome, just so long as google doesn’t stop putting effort into it.
We don’t actually make use of SELinux yet, it’s just pulled in via other libraries. We will in the future however, although the extent of that use it still up in the air.
Yeah… “everyone’s” favorite browser is the one with somewhere around 1-2% market share, depending on which stats you look at. It’s a good piece of software, but as far as adoption is concerned, the only positive is that it beats the much more established Opera…
Oh yeah, everyone’s favorite browser that collects information on you eight different ways
http://maketecheasier.com/iron-browser-a-secure-alternative-to-goog…
and shares that information with the NSA
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/02/22/google-in-bed-with-us-in…
now can match my Linux desktop! Ooh! My pants!
Edited 2009-07-09 09:57 UTC
It’s getting there…slowly
After I tried Chrome, I stuck with it. Its design and UI conquered my heart. I see less browser and *MORE* web. With current firefox, unless you choose fullscreen navigation, you will have a 400 pixel tall working UI controls/Bookmarks/Navigation bar. That is too much. With Chrome, it’s hell smaller.
Chrome is faster, while Firefox is getting sluggish. I second what the mate said – as long Google is rocking, I don’t care. Well, there is the HTML 5 native support for video and audio tags in Firefox 3.5 – even the porn mode is now present in this version. But didn’t find it intuitive, it’s pretty hidden in the UI menus. Chrome is different, I can see the Red-Hat cousin right there when I am on private nagivation. Pretty good.
I am dying to get my hands on Chrome Linux Final. Eagerly anxious anticipating this release, hopefully it will become the default browser in Ubuntu. I think Mozilla guys stopped innovating – usually it gets that way after the pride that has been built around the Mo community.
You can do much better than that without full-screen. The menu bar hardly takes up any horizontal space, so move the bookmarks to next to it. Turn off text on the toolbar – the icons are fine on their own.
By my measurements, I’m losing about 180px of screen space, counting both Firefox and the desktop. Still not as good as Chrome – I count about 90px lost there – but much better than the default.
on the maximized windows firefox, 133 pixels for everything at the top (including the titlebar), and 24 pixels of status bar at the bottom. Chrome takes up 64 pixels at the top, and nothing at the bottom. getting rid of the bookmarks bar in firefox brings the top bits down to 107, which makes it take only double chromes real estate.
With the Hide Menubar or similar addons you can easily get the same results in Firefox.
Still I really like their decision to adopt native UI stuff – they should do the same on Windows.
That’s what I was about to say. With the menubar hidden the Firefox UI is only marginally taller then Chrome. I’m not sure how to measure the exact amount of pixels, but eyeballing it I say it’s less then 20.
I’m in the minority here, but I actually don’t like the Chrome UI. What everybody sees as a step forward in ‘leanness’ I see as a step back in functionality. Chrome lacks the Home and Stop keys, which I do find useful. Chrome also lacks separate location and search boxes. I have the search box set at Wikipedia most of the time and since the location bar defaults to a Google search I can easily choose between the two by using the Ctrl+L and Ctrl+K shortcuts.
Chrome also lacks mouse gestures. After being spoiled by Opera I consider any browser without mouse gesture capability to be crippled and unusable.
Home can be enabled in the options:
http://img191.imageshack.us/i/enablehomebutton.png/
Stop replaces the Go button when a page is loading. I still say putting it on the opposite side of the screen from Reload was a crazy decision, but the devs (or Ben specifically) refuse to change it. So now I’m holding out for more toolbar customization options and/or a Stop Button extension.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1656
Firefox’s interface IS heavy compared to Chrome (and the Chromium prereleases). Looking at Firefox 3.5 vs Chrome is like the comparison between Firefox and the Seamonkey suite. It feels dated and clunky.
Fortunately help is close at hand in the form of add ons.
The Personal Menu add on, which allows you to create a personalized menu which contains only the options you want while retaining the IE-like ability to get a full menu bar via the Alt key.
The Fission plug-in allows you to get a progress meter in the URL bar like previous versions of Safari, and can display link targets in the URL bar. This allows me to permanently do away with the status bar by providing a redundant source of the only information I value.
You can see the results of these two plugins at
http://portunus.net.nz/rtfm/Chrome_vs_Firefox.png which shows a comparison Chromium and Firefox on Linux.
Edited 2009-07-09 07:26 UTC
I personally prefer Chrome’s default theme. It is consistent with the Windows version.
I’m wondering just how native they’re trying to be here? Afterall, it doesn’t look in the slightest bit native on Windows XP either – it’s title-bar has the Vista-style buttons, and doesn’t pay any attention to the color scheme of whatever theme is running. And I assume if that if it were run on MacOS, it would stand out just as much there…
Now, going by these screenshots, the version without native title bars looks fine (apart from Darklooks) – the icons fit in, and the colors are more or less right. It doesn’t look like everything else, but it doesn’t stick out too much either.
But the screenshots with native title bars look, in a word, awful – the app itself is so clearly not-native that mixing the two looks in one window is a mess. I don’t think that’s a Linux problem either – it’d look just as bad with MacOS or XP title bars.
Cool cant wait for Iron Browser for get this update as well.
Chrome uses much less memory than FF. I have “only” 2G of RAM and as soon as FF left the swapping stopped.
If only I could print from Chrome! I have to copy and paste the link to FF just for printing!
Right-click, “Print”? Works for me…
Oh…. FF brings up a GTK print dialog, Chrome brings up no dialog. Presumed it was a missing feature. Darn GTK… wonder where I can help for this.
Actually, before I go on a wild goose chase, your running Chrome on Linux right?
Ah, no – I assumed you meant Windows, since you said Chrome, rather than Chromium… I’ve not tried the latter.
Yep, no printing in Linux yet. Chrome Chromium whatever it is. Says Chrome in my title bar and “about”.
The bugzilla for it has been talking about having the “print” item off the right click menu removed until printing works!
Google Chrome is available for Linux now. It’s a dev preview/alpha-thingy, but is available via a deb repo.
What means native in Linux? I use KDE. How is GTK native here? No Chromium for me as long as it is Gtk only. I don’t appreciate the fact that I have to load Gtk libraries every time I use Chromium. And I don’t like the look and feel of Gtk applications in KDE.
Deal with it. There are two widely used toolkits on Linux, so you can’t please everyone. If they’d chosen Qt, they’d just be upsetting the people who use gnome or XFCE, and wouldn’t appreciate having to load Qt libraries to run Chrome. Every time some application gets ported to Linux, one of the two tookits is chosen, and the other faction complains about it.
But hey, feel free to try porting it to Qt… the source is there, and code that already supports Windows and Gtk+ APIs is presumably abstracted enough to support another.
I wonder, why would that be the case? Qt is a proper cross-platform and cross-desktop toolkit that has had ample KDE, Windows, Mac and Gnome integration for some time:
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2006/02/24/qt-and-glib/
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/05/13/introducing-qgtkstyle/
I have no idea why silly people keep trying to repeat that you have to ‘pick one’ and you have to ‘deal with’ an inferior Linux port of an application where the Windows version receives all the attention first. Does this sound like Firefox to you? I don’t see GTK helping out anywhere on the Windows, Mac or KDE integration front.
With this they get a cross-platform toolkit that implements a ton of functionality that works on all the platforms and desktops they’ll want to port Chrome to today, and it keeps their bug list down on all platforms because the same code will have a far better chance of working well on each platform rather than reimplementing what works.
God only knows how they’ll reliably do stuff like animations as the browser gets more complex in the future, cross-platform that all works reliably in the same way. Integrated theming? This is amateur hour that could have been implemented weeks ago, for free.
Oh dear God, not this again. Please. Read this until something sinks into the skull about perceived ‘bloatware’ (ironic given that Chrome on Linux is currently a 500MB executable that draws a window and renders some content – Evan Martin’s approximate comments):
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
You either have applications and functionality that people want or you don’t. That means programming tools and libraries. If you don’t want to load certain things for your own petty, stupid and mental complex reasons then you don’t have those applications and that functionality, you have poor imitations and no one uses you. Users simply don’t give a shit that you don’t want to load some libraries. I’ve got sick of hearing this over the years and it’s what will continually hold open source desktops back and ensure that they will continually be perceived as those things that a minority of funny people use.
I’ve dealt with the fact that Chrome on Linux will repeat all the same mistakes as Firefox and it’ll be a third-class citizen. That’s Google’s problem though. Most will keep using the Windows version and the Mac one if it works well enough. Cross-platform on an equal footing? Yer, right.
This is not about porting the GUI to Qt, which you and I both know won’t happen which is why you wrote that. It’s about learning from past mistakes and using something that will give us a cross-platform application that works well on an open source desktop.
Edited 2009-07-09 14:38 UTC
Rather than attacking me for that comment, you might pay closer attention, and note that I was quoting almost word for word they guy making the same complaint about loading Gtk+ libraries under KDE…
I’m sure you were ;-). Either way it’s still a silly argument or counterargument to make and it still doesn’t justify the daft decisions that Google have made.
You’re bitching about that?
How about the fact that this statement is bs.
That’s a load of cocka the size of Mt. Everest.
Never mind the fact the name Chromium is f’n lame–just call it Chrome.
Should we have Firefoxy because Firefox on Linux has to have a different name?
I was obviously joking. Grow a pair.
Of humour glands, I mean.
No, that should obviously be “Vulpes focî”.
Chromium and Chrome are different things. Chrome is Google’s browser, Chromium is the open source thing. If you don’t like Chromium, just run Chrome.
Chromium is the name of the open-source project that Google uses to create Google Chrome (and that SRWare uses to create Iron). They are two very different things.
Google Chrome != Chromium
Chromium + Google stuff == Google Chrome
Thus, you should not use the terms interchangeably.
Edited 2009-07-09 19:15 UTC
I think all they really did was enabled the preference in the preferences dialog. Since it was built on gtk all along (except the rendering engine and the pretty tab bar) all they had to do was provide the means for selecting the default theme.
The one thing I’m waiting for before really trying to use this as my daily browser is just to be able to set my home page. The preference is there but it currently doesn’t do anything.
Setting (and honoring) the proxy would be more important to me. Chromium is already my “normal” browser (except for flash sites = youtube + flickr) at home, but it isn’t usable at work yet.
Someone should revise the title of the article. “Themeing” isn’t in English dictionary.
I was hoping for this and it has finally come true, awesome!