Edit 2009-07-12: Chromium now supports Flash plugins.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Mozilla and Firefox. Firefox effectively paved the way for competition in the browser monopoly scenario we had a few years back. Without it, I doubt web applications development would have advanced the way it did.

But I seriously abhor using Firefox right now. On my Kubuntu Jaunty laptop, my CPU utilization bottom-lines at 5-10% on average before firing up Firefox and shoots up to 30-40% after. Its memory issues are well-documented. Typing a URL in the address bar the first time after starting up causes the entire browser to freeze while it pulls up the address history. There have been experiments that show the Windows version of Firefox running faster on Wine than the native Linux versions.

Sad to say, what I have to put up with while using Firefox detracts way too much from the positives that it represents. I want out. I want a browser I can use without having to keep a timer on so that I know when to restart it 2-3 times a day. I want a browser I can middle-click 20 RSS entries in Google Reader in rapid-fire fashion without having it lock up on me.

There are many alternatives. Not many of them work too well. Konqueror has issues rendering sites, especially Google Apps which I use 50% of my online time. Arora slows down when I have more than 5 tabs open, for some reason. Rekonq doesn’t really show the speed that WebKit advertises. I have difficulty setting proxy settings in Midori, which I assume must be set in the global Gnome settings panel, which I don’t have due to me using KDE.

I’ve been hearing many good things about Google Chrome from my partner in work. It’s supposed to be blazing fast running Google Apps (duh, being developed by Google). I’ve been waiting eagerly waiting for the Linux version but no dice so far. Until the announcement on the Chromium blog came out. Alpha warnings be damned, I want it. And right now, I’m typing this blog entry on it.

Responses on the ‘net have been mixed. Practical usability is limited, according to some. For example, a blog commenter said “Honestly…. what can you do with a browser that supports no Flash?“. Well, I guess I don’t spend 90% of my time on YouTube and Yahoo flash games, so I don’t really share his views. I’ve got 15 tabs of various contents open in Chromium running right now and I’m happy with each and one of them. I use it on a daily basis to check mail, edit Google documents, read blogs and basically perform about 90% of the things I’d use a browser for.

Here’s a list of what Chromium in its current state is suited for:

1. Practically everything related to Google web applications. GMail, Reader, Calendar, Docs etc all work very well. Video chats on GTalk doesn’t work yet.
2. General surfing as long as you don’t need to view Flash videos. I read a ton of Linux and politics related blogs every day. It’s definitely good enough.
3. In general, it’s fine for Facebook and all the social networking sites I visit. Just not the Flash bits (which I don’t use anyway).

I wouldn’t use Chromium for:

1. Obviously, anything that relies on external plugins, as there’s no support for a plugin architecture yet.
2. Any site that requires HTTP authentication. Auth dialog boxes don’t work yet. The issue has been documented here, help vote for it to be solved, please!
3. Complicated bookmark management, it’s rather kludgy right now. Importing bookmarks from Firefox works though.
4. Going through proxies that are authentiated using HTTP auth dialog boxes. I get by this by using Firefox to authenticate against the proxy and then continuing to browser using Chromium. Ugly hack.
5. Sites authenticated using SSL certificates are defnitely out.

Update: As of 22 June 2009, the daily builds has been supporting HTTP authentication. W00t!

Don’t expect it to be too stable. However, a particular tab crashing due to any issue would just manifest itself in a “Oh Snap!” error message in that particular tab and not bring down your entire browser due to its 1 process per tab architecture, which mitigates the impact of any bugs an awful lot.

So do I still use Firefox now? Well, I still need it for various tasks. Firebug is still essential for web development work. My Trac installations are authenticated using SSL certificates so I have to fallback to Firefox. Yes, I do unwind after work by watching some documentaries on YouTube so I’d need it for that as well. But in general, Firefox has been relegated to serving only 10% of my web browsing needs. I completely understand the fact that Firefox has a superset of features compared to Chrome/Chromium and that contributes significantly to the difference in experience. However, Firefox just doesn’t have a configuration that suits me right now and that’s why I need to shop around for alternatives.

Firefox will continue to be relevant to most of the web browsing world for a long time yet. I don’t expect Chrome to attain larger market share than Firefox in the near term. But it’s seriously looking more and more like its predecessor the Mozilla suite, which was evolved out of existence due to its bloat.

Sharing is caring