So as many of you will be aware I’ve been suffering from Firefox problems, these problems persisted without resolution, various updates were released which didn’t correct the problem. I was suffering from complete lockups of the browser with complimentary slow cursor and frozen computer, X crashes, typing lag and various other quirks.
As far as I’m concerned, firefox has gotten to a point on Linux where I’m reminded of Internet Explorer 6. That’s right, I just compared firefox to IE6… It’s seems to have been under development in the same direction for so long that the code is rotting. This is only my opinion, and the code is probably really clean but this doesn’t excuse the sluggish nature of the browser the repeated failures and the appearance of “Oh this is embarrassing” in the browser after repeated crashes.
I remember when firefox first launched I jumped on it like a flash saying things like “wow, have you seen how fast it is” and “it just works!”… This was during a time where I was switching from IE6 and old Mozilla.
Well, as it was back then, it is again; the new kid on the block has arrived, developed from scratch with solid engineering principles and a fundamentally better architectural design.
Enter Google Chrome…
I’m now saying the same things about chrome that I once said about firefox. I don’t think I’ll ever switch back full time, only to use those sites which chrome has trouble with while the development continues. I’ve managed to get chrome configured nicely with the –enable-plugins hack and a link to the /opt/google/chrome/plugins/ folder for libflashplayer.so so I’m happy, I have flash, a browser that starts in less than a second, and handles plugin and page crashes independent of the browser, better memory management and general slicker experience, with the tabs right across the top of the screen my browsing experience is delightful.
Google chrome is my new friend 
There is no end to the praise that I’ll bestow on chrome now, I just hope that in 5 years time it’s still the same quality, or whether there’ll be yet another new kid for me to switch to.
Thank you google for giving me a browser that works!
Just to be clear… because it wasn’t clear in the last post on this subject.
Are you having issues with firefox cross-operating system? The last post you had on this subject mentioned a specific linux distribution that I personally don’t run. Because your issues really feel like lower stack issues and not the application itself.
-jef
I don’t use windows so just on Ubuntu Linux, I haven’t switched back to fedora on my laptop yet.
Are you running “Chrome” or “Chromium”? I’ve been running the Chromium Daily Builds from the (Ubuntu) PPA repo for a while now, and I love ‘em. Like you I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Firefox.
I’m running google chrome
Karl,
What is the likelihood that what you are experiencing in terms of instability introduced by some Ubuntu specific patch or bug somewhere else in the Ubuntu stack? You can’t rule that out in the troubleshooting you have done, and it seems rather unfair to lay these problems at the feet of firefox developers until you do.
Another question. Are you using the Ubuntu repository firefox or the upstream Mozilla firefox binaries?
-jef
Yup. Chromium is also way better integrated with the desktop than Firefox is. Although it looks pretty different, the developers go out of their way to make it fit in GNOME:
* Scrolling the mouse wheel over the tab bar works
* Downloads are opened using the correct application (as in the Freedesktop spec) rather than something defined in-browser
* Downloads have the correct icons
* It uses normal GTK widgets where applicable
* Directly opens gnome-network-properties when the user goes to change proxy settings in the browser
At this rate, (since there still isn’t enough interest in Epiphany), I hope to see Chrome or Chromium as the default for 10.04! It would vastly improve the experience users have.
Personally, all I need to be switched full time is Feedly, which is working on support right now
@Jef, the problem is related to firefox, flash, nvidia, xorg or a combination thereof. I don’t have the time to start digging into what’s wrong, all I want is something that works.
I’ve been using chrome full time now for 3 days, absolutely no problems. No locking up of the machine at all, not sluggishness, the web is fast again, I don’t get frequent crashes of the flash plugin which require a restart of the browser, pages which used to make firefox bork and take my machine with it now make one tab sad. The best part, the very best part of using chrome is that I’m not wasting all of my memory on firefox anymore, where it gets progressively slower the more time moves on.
@Jef, I don’t want to start getting into a “find out the solution” discussion, I have a solution, use chrome!
I was going to say it’s a shame your not talking about webkit Epiphany but if what Dylan says above about Gnome integration level is true then there’s no need for a separate project just direct any Gnome love needed at chromium.
Karl:
And I’m telling you…minus the nvidia driver…I have a configuration in Fedora that is working. And that’s a head scratcher. I’d need to dig up a machine that needs nvidia to do a completely comparable test.
I’m not saying that you aren’t allowed to be frustrated, what I am suggesting is that maybe…just maybe…your choice of distribution..is having a significant impact on how firefox is running outside of the direct control of the upstream firefox developers. Are you going to let engineering choices made by your operating system vendor which degrade performance dictate to you which applications you use on a daily basis?
Maybe…just maybe…your anger is directed at the wrong group of developers. Is it really fair to be mad at firefox developers if I can demonstrate to you that firefox works quite well for me on Fedora for the workloads you care about?
If you don’t want to spend time trying to figure it out where the problem then please don’t throw the vitriol around assuming you know who is to blame.
If you want to be a fan of chrome…be a fan of chrome. If you want to be a fan of Ubuntu..be a fan of Ubuntu. But please don’t drag the reputation of the firefox developers through the mud because the engineering choices made for Ubuntu specifically degrade firefox performance.
-jef
Jef, I use Ubuntu 9.04 and I have an Nvidia card. I use Firefox 3.5 from the ubuntu-mozilla-daily ppa, and update it regularly.
While Firefox does suffer from low performance (especially with high disk usage), it has never frozen my computer or caused an X crash/typing lag, etc.
I like Chrome, but I need it to have a better bookmark sync. I have about 2000+ bookmarks – they sync with Xmarks like a dream.
Jef:
Instead of blaming Karl or his distribution, I suggest you actually try Chrome/Chromium for a day, with a ton of tabs, and do an honest comparison of performance (as perceived by a user) by the end of the day.
I use openSUSE and have had similar issues as Karl. I’m back to FF now for feature reasons, but Chrome/Chromium is insanely better in performance on my distro. Fortunately the hangs I experience now in FF are finite in duration, and do not bring down X or my window manager. So while I’m perfectly willing to accept that distro bugs could have caused the more destructive issues, I’m not convinced that there’s anything my distro could do to make FF feel as performant as Chrome/Chromium on the same OS.
Can you point to specific things Ubuntu and openSUSE are doing wrong here?
I have been using chromium as of late and the only real complaint I have is that the open video(html5) implementation is not as fast as Firefox yet.
The javascript performance in my experience is a hell of a lot faster than firefox and it seems to render pages nicer(it doesn’t stop responding when scrolling a page like firefox does).
Firefox 3.5 needs some respect though as it was more about integrating html5 than refactoring and performance.
From what I have heard 3.6 alpha seems to rectify some issues in terms of performance already but when it comes to the backend I think I prefer webkit and the v8 javascript engine.
With regards to chrome’s future, well I can see the same thing happening to it that happened with firefox, they now have a theming engine and they are talking about extensions.
I don’t really see the point in extensions as I believe that the future of the web should be less about browser addons and more about server side applications and services.
I would prefer if they put the effort into v8(rather than plugins) for future functionality like canvas3d(webgl), so that higher web based libraries can be built using javascript rather than to provide high level libraries built into the browser itself(o3d).
I can see Mozilla refactoring Firefox at some point because they share the same view of the browser providing the bare essentials so that web based high performance apps and libraries can be developed.
Lets just see if tracemonkey can surpass v8.
I’m not familiar with the Ubuntu Chromium build. Does it still send your web history and everything back to Google? Because that’s a big price to pay for increased performance.
I switched to Chromium (daily) two weeks ago. For the exact same reasons.
I am curious what your impressions of Arora (http://arora-browser.org) and its integration with Gnome is. I try hard to integrate cleanly and am curious for spots that you noticed where it can be improved.
I’ve been running chromium daily for a while now, it’s great. Apart from one or two regressions which lasted a day or so, it’s been an amazingly stable experience. I still can’t believe how fast it is, especially with the tabs. No other app does tabs as well as chrome does in my opinion.
I used to get quite a few firefox lockups, especially related to the flash player. While the flash player lockups are still there, they’re very nicely hidden.
I’m extremely happy with my switch to chromium.
@Jef
I’m not angry, I’m happy as larry I have chrome!
I agree that it might not be upstream firefox, but something in this configuration borks it, but doesn’t bother me now, I have chrome!
I haven’t used arora, but it looks interesting enough, unfortunately I’m so happy with chrome I won’t try another browser yet
@Karl I wasn’t aware that Chrome for Linux was available yet – just Chromium (as I’m using). Are you running the Windows version in WINE or did I miss a major announcement?!?
Hey, I don’t care about trouble shooting, reporting bugs, or figuring out why my computer was actually crashing! I’ll just blame Firefox and use Chrome instead! Clearly, Firefox is the default on most Linux distros because these are highly common issues which affect everyone else, too!
I’ll also make random comparisons to IE6 and ignore the value of a well established code base!
–
Forgive me if I’m trolling, but this is pretty much how I’ve read your posts on the matter.
And people have laughed and called me crazy for sticking with Epiphany all these years. Mwahahahaha! Been rock solid and never had nary a problem with it in all that time. But Chromium (and also Midori) are looking pretty interesting, though.
@James, with two binary blobs involved and the likelihood that there’s an issue regarding how they all interact with each other on my specific hardware do you have the time to debug a problem like that? And I’m not the only person that has problems with firefox, it’s not perfect. It’s regularly referred to as firefail or failfox. You don’t get a name like that for nothing. Just like internet explorer didn’t get called internet exploder for nothing.
Firefox is the new IE6, not necessarily because of the code, which is why I said it’s probably very clean, but because the browser behaves like IE6 did around the time I switched away forever… That’s where the comparison lies just in case you misread while you were getting your troll anger built up.
They made an announcement of the beta of chrome for linux a while ago;
in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list; add
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable main
apt-get update
apt-get install google-chrome-unstable (ironic really, as it’s more stable than firefox!)
I wish Chromium wouldn’t come with all the privacy issues Chrome does, so I am still waiting for Epiphany to get on track.
@Torben, I don’t think there really are any privacy concerns, the code is open source so I doubt they’re dumping all of your personal data back up to google, instead they have a tick box which sends some anonymous usage statistics and crash reports back automatically. You can turn it off, I doubt that anywhere else in the code base they’re doing something nefarious or else someone would have found the nasty code and informed the world.
As far as privacy goes, don’t delude yourself that anything you do on the web is private. ISP’s store enormous amounts of data about customers, google analytics also accumulates information about users and this runs on many many websites.
I’m fine with google having knowledge of some of what I do on the web, it’s no biggy, I’m more comfortable with google having that data than my ISP, if you seriously consider it, freedom on the web is being throttled and choked it’ll get a lot worse in the future too you only have to look at the kind of blocking they have in Finland to see what I mean.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/18/finnish_policy_censor_activist/
Thanks for your reply Karl, german gouvernment is working on censorship as well and “nobody” stands up against what they call fight against child porn and terrorism.
You are right, Google is probably not the biggest problem on the Internet these days. On the other hand Google already knows a lot about our suring habits (Google Ads, Google Apps gmail, …), no need to give them even more power. There are several Chromium variants with an eye on privacy, as my english is a bit lousy let me just point you to an overview of differences between Chromium and Iron:
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php
@Torben; thanks for the comparison all of it seems just right… So yeah google suggest is the kind of thing you really can’t get away from but the feature is kinda worth it.
WRT Child pornography and terrorism as reasons for taking away freedoms. Firsly, and correct me if I’m wrong, pedophiles don’t tend to access material like that via the web, I’d wager that a peer to peer system is utilised instead, they’ll probably use some kind of encryption too because they know what they are doing is wrong.
Child pornography being distributed via the web is HIGHLY unlikely, the web is fairly visible and easy to track and trace.
In a similar way, I doubt that terrorists use the web to organise, I mean it’s ludicrous to think that a terrorist plot is put together on a phpBB or something like that.
What we’re actually looking at is the governments desperation to catalog every person, their actions and profile them in order to manage us more like cattle and less like people.
This is symptomatic of the society we live in which is rotten from the top to the bottom. The problem is that the human race generates petabytes of data daily, and among that there’s probably less than 1% of real nasty stuff going on. We are told that we must weed out that 1% by giving away our right to freedom of communication.
This is wrong!
with regard to child pornography rings, some REAL police work should be carried out, rather than relying on data collected from the internet. If we (the UK) spent more money on social welfare of children we already know are at risk, and less on trying to catch internet pedophiles then things like the “Baby P” fiasco would never have happened. – there’s also been evidence to suggest that child pornography can reduce the risk of child abuse as it satisfies the sick fetish without bringing harm to children.
On the terrorism thing, Ben Franklin once said something particularly poignant I’ll quote him here
“Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”
For years the UK lived with a very very real threat of terrorism, but the choice was made that instead of executing orwellian powers to try and prevent it, that the police would become more involved in infiltrating the terrorist cells and attempt to prevent, or at least warn of anything that was happening.
The approach taken during the 70s through to the 90s was a more correct one, than trying to issue ID cards to every UK/EU citizen.
Terrorists don’t carry their ID cards, they carry YOURS!
“child pornography can reduce the risk of child abuse as it satisfies the sick fetish without bringing harm to children.” — obviously the production of the pornography itself aside.
For the people wondering about Epiphany, see http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/WebKit228 and http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/WebKit230 to learn more about progress and plans for the upcoming Gnome releases. As always, help is more than welcome.
Karl, open-source or not Google Chrome sends _every character you type_ to Google, even if you don’t actually hit return. Google it.
I much prefer Chrome over Firefox as well, I’m kinda hoping someone will make a version of it that removes this send-everything-to-google feature.
@Sean, I don’t think “every character you type”, my internet connection is far too poor for that! (I use British Telecom *sigh*)
If you read up to the earlier comments by Torben you’ll see that the browser you seek does in fact exist. It’s called Iron apparently
There’s also a comparison of the privacy features of Iron to what chrome does in fact do.
I just tried it, and I must admit I’m quite impressed with the speed. However, I feel it tries a bit too hard to stand out. Since I’m on Gnome, I use either Epiphany or Midori. Midori is very fast and sticks to the basics, something I quite like. I’m looking forward to epiphany-webkit too – so I have the option to use a few plugins.
Slightly off-topic, or maybe not. How do I get flash working in chrome (not chromium)? I’m on Ubuntu 9.04, if thats relevant.
sorry, stupid question. Run with –enable-plugins switch.
+1 for chrome. I share your feelings. It’s lightning fast, extremely slick and just works. It was default browser on Windows for a while now. Now, it’s my default browser now on linux too. One of the biggest problems I had with FF is the slowness of the awesomebar. I have even reduced my history to 7 days with no luck. Unfortunately, I don’t want to turn it off, because I use it all the time. Chrome’s awesome bar is blazing fast. Not to mention FF is ass slow to start up and keeps asking me if I want to restore session with a stupid popup.
@seanh, I am a Chromium developer, and the primary author of the “Omnibox” combined search and address bar. Chromium and Google Chrome absolutely do *not* send “every character you type” to Google.
Here are a few blog posts with details on what we do and don’t do (scheme removed to avoid tripping the spam detector):
blog.chromium.org/2008/10/google-chrome-chromium-and-google.html
googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2008/09/beta-release-0214930.html (see the comment about r1978)
…as well as:
googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/update-to-google-suggest.html (what happens to data that reaches the Google Suggest servers)
Finally, you are welcome to look at our source code directly; the file you want is:
src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/autocomplete/search_provider.cc?view=markup
In short, there are a number of conditions which apply to whether we send queries to a suggestion service, including that you’re not typing anything sensitive-looking, you’ve been idle for 200 ms, you have “use a suggestion service” on, and you’re using a search engine that supports it.
Thanks for the links Peter, it does indeed seem that what I’d been reading about Chrome was exaggerated. Obviously they were referring to the search suggestions feature, but I see that it can be simply disabled. (Also it seems to be the same Google Suggest that Firefox uses, and I don’t remember a big fuss when Firefox introduced it.)
One thing — is there an installer for Chromium as opposed to Chrome, for either Windows or Linux? Or does it have to be compiled from source? I’m sure that in the past I installed Chromium on Windows with an installer, but I can’t for the life of me find it now, the Chromium pages seems to just link to Chrome, and the Ubuntu PPA seems to be Chrome as well.
@seanh, the Ubuntu PPA is chromium, not chrome.