Ubuntu To Look At Replacing Firefox With Chromium

[Ericg]

You have 4GB of ram? then what are you worrying about?

I do have 4GG of RAM. And right now I've got firefox loaded up with 10 tabs, 4 of them unloaded, ZRAM is running with 4 compressed swaps in RAM, Prelink just did its thing, preload and readahead as well, and Its backed by a 4GB swap partition on an SSD just incase. All of this is running on a KDE 4.10 Arch x86_64 desktop.

All of this is consuming 1,452 of 3,277MB of RAM.

Do I NEED to worry about RAM usage? Well, no, not really. With Linux I will probably be good for a few years to come with 4GBs of RAM, but thats not the point. I like my system to be relatively lean and memory efficient (i use KDE because I like KDE). If the RAM is being used for something useful, then I dont mind it being used. But I just want to make sure the RAM isn't only being used becase of memory leaks or bad design.

[ifadey]

Not Good

I love Firefox. Please don't do this

[molecule-eye]

Molecule... what are you smoking? Share it, because its obviously good. Let's correct basically every sentence in your post...the PDF reader and flash support are just plugins. any PPAPI enabled browser could load them. Chromium all be default use the same flash plugin as firefox but its not mandatory. All you have to do to switch between old and new flash is a symlink, which Canonical could ship by default. Google chrome and chromium are the same codebase so your entire thing about the end about scrollbars, not theming well and not having bookmarks is a complete lie or at minimum laziness on your part for not changing settings.

I tried to be explicit about DEFAULT configurations, as setting up plugins for oneself (which requires, I imagine, root access to folders and some terminal work) is not something many (dare I say MOST?) users will be doing/know how to do/know is even an option. If Canonical set this configuration up themselves they might as well go with Chrome, as I said.

I know that Chrome and Chromium have the same theming issues; I was suggesting they stick with FF which doesn't and integrates better. You can go to settings in Chromium and use the "GTK theme" but it doesn't respect scrollbars and other elements. Have you even used Chromium on linux, because you seem not to be aware of these super basic things? You can't just (in any straightforward way I know of) have Chromium theme properly. You can get a bookmarks menu by adding an extension, but most of them are terrible, and they're not there by default. Probably many (dare I say MOST?) won't even know to look for one.

[molecule-eye]

I love Firefox. Please don't do this

You are aware that you'll still be able to install FF yourself. It's like it's dying or anything.

[tvall]

Any specific reason for the sarcasm, Calinou? The Pentium 3 line especially was uncalled for. I care about ram usage because my laptop has soldered on ram so I'm locked at 4GB so I do have to care a out ram usage. and no I'd you're anything like me you have more than 5 tabs open. maybe I'm the exception but I frequently have 10+

my desktop running debian unstable has 2gb of ram. I have a habit of having 15+ tabs open at all times, and I rarely see it go over 1gb used. I use lxde instead of kde though, when I'm not in the mood for fluxbox.

[tancrackers]

Many websites

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.

Newgrounds, some youtube videos still refuse HTML5, espn, facebook games, omgpop, webmd, hulu, forbes, bleacherreport, and most websites that have videos.
Like it or not, flash is a necessity for many if not most people.

[asim75]

We should keep Firefox as default browser in Ubuntu

[Ericg]

I tried to be explicit about DEFAULT configurations, as setting up plugins for oneself (which requires, I imagine, root access to folders and some terminal work) is not something many (dare I say MOST?) users will be doing/know how to do/know is even an option. If Canonical set this configuration up themselves they might as well go with Chrome, as I said.

I know that Chrome and Chromium have the same theming issues; I was suggesting they stick with FF which doesn't and integrates better. You can go to settings in Chromium and use the "GTK theme" but it doesn't respect scrollbars and other elements. Have you even used Chromium on linux, because you seem not to be aware of these super basic things? You can't just (in any straightforward way I know of) have Chromium theme properly. You can get a bookmarks menu by adding an extension, but most of them are terrible, and they're not there by default. Probably many (dare I say MOST?) won't even know to look for one.

Why would Canonical not ship the symlink by default? Maybe google wont let them ship Chrome (does the EULA prevent redistribution)? Maybe they dont like Google Spyware, mabe they don't like the fact that Chrome is a derivative of Chromium and they'd rather stick to upstream? I'm just spitballing here, but im just pointing out: they may have their reasons.

For your other points, I popped up pacman and installed Chromium just now, and we'll see if your other two points stand:

I will give you that it doesnt resepct theming for scrollbars. I honestly had never noticed that since my GTK theme is always Oxygen-gtk and Chromium respects every OTHER bar of the theme from what I can see right now.

Bookmarks, however... no. Settings > Bookmarks. 1) "Show Bookmarks Bar" which is more than enough unless you have tons of bookmarks (I dont personally, i clean out my bookmarks after they stop being useful). 2) "Bookmark Manager" ---> what more do you want? Its a full menu of all bookmarks?

After some research into Chromium I found: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/is...etail?id=10949 turns out the scrollbar issue is a bit more complicated tan "We dont want to do it."

[Elijah Lynn]

Phoronix: Ubuntu To Look At Replacing Firefox With Chromium

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...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM3Mjk

Maybe this would help Chromium actually get timely updates from Ubuntu's repo!

[Fenrin]

The code is there for all to see. If you find something in there that's spyware, feel free to report it.

Chrome is acting as keylogger. I have no idea if this feature is also implemented in Chromium though.

Google Chrome a Keylogger ? Privacy Concerns