Ubuntu To Look At Replacing Firefox With Chromium

[Dukenukemx]

Why not ask the user during installation what they would like? Maybe include both?

[varikonniemi]

I am fairly certain this has to do with some affiliate deal; google paying them better for having chromium+google default browser than firefox+google.

Every decision canonical makes is looking to maximize their revenue.

[Kivada]

He probably meant that it lacks an updated Flash version. PPAPI Flash is up to 11.5 already and the NPAPI Flash plugin is permernently locked to v11.2 with only security and bug fixes for the next 4 years after which it will be discontinued.

Basically the only sane way to get upto-date Flash for Linux is to use Chromium or Chrome.

And what are you using that actually still requires Flash? I haven't had it installed in 4 years now and no site I use these days expect it. The only site I know of that actually requires it is Newgrounds.

[Luke]

Chromium is vulnerable to browser fingerprinting

Yes, and probably Chromium spy on you like Chrome.

You can disable the "on by default" spyware in chromium, but you can't totally disable auto-searching of misspelled URL's except by setting the default search engine to something you 127.0.0.1 'ed out in /etc/hosts. A bigger problem is this: in Panopticlick (panopticlick.eff.org , used to test browser uniqueness) it is almost impossible to keep Chromium from coming up as a "unique" browser configuration when enabling Javascript, while I can usually keep Firefox to about 1 in 200,000 with Javascript enabled ot 1 in 1,000 or less when Javascript is disabled.

If you are concerned about cookieless tracking and the implications for privacy, you must use a browser that appears to webservers as something that is not only common, but which does not reportback too much information about itself in its useragent, etc. You can change some of these factors with some difficulty, but I've never been able to keep Panopticlick from reporting a Chromium install as "unique." That means you can't keep Google, Facebook, et all from doing so either if they start to use cookieless tracking to try and work out your identity. If they do, that information, once in their servers, is subject to subpeona, sale on bankruptcy of the company, all the usual stuff.

This stuff is why I use NoScript and Ghostery, don't use Facebook at all, and use any Google product only through Torbrowser and without having an account. I still have Chromium installed, but only use it with sites I know and trust when a Firefox-specific site bug crops up.

[moilami]

Linux developers are considering this week replacing Mozilla Firefox with Chromium, Google's open-source version of their Chrome web-browser, for the Ubuntu 13.10 release. -- Larabell

Please, I have rarely a need to complain of "journalism" here, but this is going far too much over the edge

Linux is the kernel. Ubuntu is a collection of software configured to work nicely together.

[Grogan]

I just use the one flash plugin... I drop libflashplayer.so in ~/.mozilla/plugins and it gets picked up by all browsers that use it. I only care about videos, so I don't foresee any need for a newer version of flash in the near future as long as the old is maintained with respect to crashability and security.

I keep Firefox around, but I switched to Chromium some time ago. It's my favourite to date. I do a build once a week or so (Sooner if there's a problem. For example one time there was a problem with CSS that broke, of all things, this site for me. It was fixed the next day. Sometimes later if I'm really happy with what I've got.)

I'm not crazy about the dumbed down user interface (I can do everything I need to and there are some decent settings in about:flags so I'll live with it) but the browser itself is good. It's lightning fast, and what appeals to me is the sandboxing and process separation for each tab. So, if some stupid flash ad or something crashes the session, it's just one tab that goes "oh, snap!". Ram? I have assloads of it. Chromium can have it to make my browser work the way it does, it doesn't bother me that it's wasteful.

Pages look good, too. Oh yeah, and it uses my dark theme settings in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 so it fits in with my XFCE and other GTK apps. (i.e. it doesn't look like Google Fucking Chrome )

[chilek]

they're talking over and over again...

Yes, more they're talking, then they are much better "linux developers"?
For now, I think, they are only Ubuntu developers, and better would stay this ;-)

[Calinou]

Over all-- more RAM. Chrome splits up tabs into separate processes so that they are sandboxed, but each one has all Chrome deps.

Chrome under use for 1hr: 1700mbs of RAM used.
Firefox under use for 1hr: 1200MBs of RAM being used.

Sites: Linuxhomepage.com, phoronix.com, arstechnica.com, h-online.com and news.google.com

Adblock is up on both. Before Firefox version...18 or so, I would've agreed. But the last few versions Mozilla has been paying special attention to RAM and CPU usage in no small part because Android firefox and Desktop firefox share much of the same code, therefore they cant be assuming "4gbs of ram" and instead have to make sure its good on 512mb or 1gb

Few desktops/laptops have less than 4GB today (and an upgrade to 8GB doesn't even cost $30), mobile devices are also getting more and more RAM (1 to 2GB currently, but I doubt these would run a "full" version of Chromium, on top of that you usually have less than 5 tabs around).

Firefox will be slow on a Pentium 3, why don't you complain too?

[johnc]

For some reason Firefox JavaScript performance is just pathetic for me. Chromium is nice and smooth.

[leamas]

Perfomance...

... has many aspects. For me, one of the bottlenecks is watching flash-based video-content on low-powered (i. e., silent) linux boxes. Firefox seem to be doing the right things here, adopting to use local gstreamer backends to access hardware acceleration. And of course the shumway project, which eventually aims to be able to run flash content through these backends.

The flash plugin video performance on Linux is actually an abomination, sorry to say. It's just so sad, they were on their way to get the hw acceleration in place with the latest betas, but they didn't make before they stopped the desktop development. OTOH, this makes the decision simple: the Linux plugin is not usable.

I don't understand those not encountering flash content out there. Are everyone using just Netflix and Youtube? It seems that the only solutions approved the the copyright owners are Flash and Silverlight. HTML5 still has a long way to go for those concerned about pirating their films.