This might be old news for some of you (especially Linux users) that knew this already. But out of pure boredom, I decided to download and install the current stable version of Google's Chrome. And to my surprise, Chrome is actually a few steps faster that the current version of Chromium!

For those Window users & OSX users that don't know the whole story, Chromium is an open-source web browser that Google borrowed/copied as the foundation for what would become Chrome. While Chrome is available cross-platform, Chromium is only available for Linux. It's also well known that Chrome (stable, beta, & unstable) gets updated a little soons than Chromium.

But anyway, as it stands, I'm now considering using Chrome as my main browser, keep Chromium as back up, and just uninstall Firefox altogether to make space on my hard drive. No decision is final yet, but I'm keep all options open.

Any suggestions? Comments?

[Edited 6/15/13 9:06am]

By far my favorite interfacei is Safari; however, I think it's too buggy, and it doesn't use the flash player very well (this is a diminishign concern but enough to keep me from using it).

I also really like the Chrome browser, but I forget why I stopped using it.

As far as Firefox, I am currently using firefox, but it also has a problem

with the flash plugin (though nowhere near as bad as Safari). This causes

it to really hammer the CPU.

I'm on a mac though, and I suspect PC users dont' have quite the same isue.

Sometimes, I think Apple has made it deliberately difficult to use flash

in some underlying abstraction layer of their OS-X jelly.

imago said:

By far my favorite interfacei is Safari; however, I think it's too buggy, and it doesn't use the flash player very well (this is a diminishign concern but enough to keep me from using it).

I also really like the Chrome browser, but I forget why I stopped using it.

As far as Firefox, I am currently using firefox, but it also has a problem

with the flash plugin (though nowhere near as bad as Safari). This causes

it to really hammer the CPU.

I'm on a mac though, and I suspect PC users dont' have quite the same isue.

Sometimes, I think Apple has made it deliberately difficult to use flash

in some underlying abstraction layer of their OS-X jelly.

PC users have too many options available to avoid THAT^ kind of problem you're having on Mac.

And speaking of flash player, didn't the late Steve Jobs speak out against using flash player because of a long-term investment Apple was going to have with HTML5? (Oh, and my apologies for sounding like a computer geek! )

I've made a conscious decisiond not to use Chrome or its open source brother Chromium. I just download to Linux Mint 15 (Mate) and choose Opera and Tor as my browsers of choice, DuckDuckGo is my search engine. FireFox keeps crashing, I can't be bothered. On the Macbook its Sarfari with Duck as my search engine. Basically I'm tighting up how I commnicate online and use the World Wide Web. But Chrome has been reduced to one computer Vista junk and if I didn't have a YouTube account I'd probably ditch it... at that I may anyway. The faster Flash goes to the grave yard the better, its always been a pain in the ass.

TD3 said:

I've made a conscious decisiond not to use Chrome or its open source brother Chromium. I just download to Linux Mint 15 (Mate) and choose Opera and Tor as my browsers of choice, DuckDuckGo is my search engine. FireFox keeps crashing, I can't be bothered. On the Macbook its Sarfari with Duck as my search engine. Basically I'm tighting up how I commnicate online and use the World Wide Web. But Chrome has been reduced to one computer Vista junk and if I didn't have a YouTube account I'd probably ditch it... at that I may anyway. The faster Flash goes to the grave yard the better, its always been a pain in the ass.

If you don't mind myself asking, what was the final straw for you concerning Chrome/Chromium?

TonyVanDam said:

TD3 said:

I've made a conscious decisiond not to use Chrome or its open source brother Chromium. I just download to Linux Mint 15 (Mate) and choose Opera and Tor as my browsers of choice, DuckDuckGo is my search engine. FireFox keeps crashing, I can't be bothered. On the Macbook its Sarfari with Duck as my search engine. Basically I'm tighting up how I commnicate online and use the World Wide Web. But Chrome has been reduced to one computer Vista junk and if I didn't have a YouTube account I'd probably ditch it... at that I may anyway. The faster Flash goes to the grave yard the better, its always been a pain in the ass.

If you don't mind myself asking, what was the final straw for you concerning Chrome/Chromium?

Its been a slow process of coming to terms I need to "pull the plug" or limit my footprint.

I've had issue with Google since 2010 when basically users signed away their privacy for access to Google's "free" software. In my humble opinion, the price to have access and use their products is way too high for a number of reasons.... not withstanding their involvement fuzz relationship with NSA / Prism program. Its not that I'm surprised, we signed away some key Constitutional rights with the Patriot Act years ago. The NSA scandal was the last straw.

The push from Goggle to have a phone number, use your real name on YouTube, Google + accounts is basically in attempt to keep a vertical time-line of all of your actives. That information could be used and abused by banking institutions, health insurance companies, credit card companies, law enforcement, our government, hackers, and schemers... the list goes on.

I can live without Google but Google can't survive without use. Thanks but no thanks.

=========================================

[Edited 6/15/13 22:57pm]

By the way here are some alternatives...

Search enginea: Ixquick, DuckDuckGo

HTTPS Everywhere

Prism break

There are alternatives folks. Tony has been telling us for years to get off the plantation... he was right!

=========================

[Edited 6/15/13 21:40pm]

TD3 said:

TonyVanDam said:

If you don't mind myself asking, what was the final straw for you concerning Chrome/Chromium?

Its been a slow process of coming to terms I need to "pull the plug" or limit my footprint.

I've had issue with Google since 2010 when basically users signed away their privacy for access to Google's "free" software. In my humble opinion, the price to have access and use their products is way too high for a number of reasons.... not withstanding their involvement fuzz relationship with NSA / Prism program. Its not that I'm surprised, we signed away some key Constitutional rights with the Patriot Act years ago. The NSA scandal was the last straw.

The push from Goggle to have a phone number, use your real name on YouTube, Google + accounts is basically in attempt to keep a vertical time-line of all of your actives. That information could be used and abused by banking institutions, health insurance companies, credit card companies, law enforcement, our government, hackers, and schemers... the list goes on.

I can live without Google but Google can't survive without use. Thanks but no thanks.

=========================================

[Edited 6/15/13 22:57pm]

I've never used nor do I have an Google+ account, so I can't comment on that either way. But I still have a YouTube account and Google is still asking me for my phone number for security purposes with my gmail address (which I don't even used at all but to maintain a YouTube account!). If they think I'm ever going to change my mind, they can kiss my black ass!

TD3 said:

By the way here are some alternatives...

Search enginea: Ixquick, DuckDuckGo

HTTPS Everywhere

Prism break

There are alternatives folks. Tony has been telling us for years to get off the plantation... he was right!

=========================

[Edited 6/15/13 21:40pm]

I can also recommed Startpages, the world's most private search engine.

https://www.startpage.com/

And yes, I'm still trying to encourge people to get off of the Microsoft Plantation and consider making to switich to Linux Microsoft's glory days ended right along with the support of Windows XP. But I'll save my bashing for the next thread.

TonyVanDam said:

imago said:

By far my favorite interfacei is Safari; however, I think it's too buggy, and it doesn't use the flash player very well (this is a diminishign concern but enough to keep me from using it).

I also really like the Chrome browser, but I forget why I stopped using it.

As far as Firefox, I am currently using firefox, but it also has a problem

with the flash plugin (though nowhere near as bad as Safari). This causes

it to really hammer the CPU.

I'm on a mac though, and I suspect PC users dont' have quite the same isue.

Sometimes, I think Apple has made it deliberately difficult to use flash

in some underlying abstraction layer of their OS-X jelly.

PC users have too many options available to avoid THAT^ kind of problem you're having on Mac.

And speaking of flash player, didn't the late Steve Jobs speak out against using flash player because of a long-term investment Apple was going to have with HTML5? (Oh, and my apologies for sounding like a computer geek! )

Jobs spoke out against flash long before he spoke in favor of HTML5, though that became the official reason apple has never supported flash. It stems mostly from Adobe's refusal to offer Photoshop and some other high end software on the MAc back in the late 90s. I don't think he ever forgave Adobe. He even offered Final Touch Pro as an alternative to the Adobe Suite for movie making.

And flash was dying anyway before Apple. It's rendering engine is CPU intensive, whereas the video/graffics in HTML5 are handled the GPU and other hardware--ergo, smoother graphics with less lag, etc.

On a cellphone, I can see this being an issue, but on a computer, despite not being optimal, a full capable computer should be able to handle this--however, Macs really suck at it. I refuse to swap my primary computer over to a PC, so it's something I have to endure on mac until flash is finally diminished enough for it not to be an issue.

Anyways, as far as browsers are concerned, I like chrome the best, unless you're dealing with portables like tablets and cellphones--then I like Opera or Dolphin.

[Edited 6/17/13 9:46am]

How fast and how reliably Chromium runs depends entirely on your distribution (or, to be more precise, the way the packages it relies on are configured).

I wouldn't say I've been happy with the "official" packages for Chromium available in quite a while (I use the Debian repositories). I'm too lazy to attempt to fix it myself as many other browsers currently work so well without any extra work needed.

TonyVanDam said:

TD3 said:

Its been a slow process of coming to terms I need to "pull the plug" or limit my footprint.

I've had issue with Google since 2010 when basically users signed away their privacy for access to Google's "free" software. In my humble opinion, the price to have access and use their products is way too high for a number of reasons.... not withstanding their involvement fuzz relationship with NSA / Prism program. Its not that I'm surprised, we signed away some key Constitutional rights with the Patriot Act years ago. The NSA scandal was the last straw.

The push from Goggle to have a phone number, use your real name on YouTube, Google + accounts is basically in attempt to keep a vertical time-line of all of your actives. That information could be used and abused by banking institutions, health insurance companies, credit card companies, law enforcement, our government, hackers, and schemers... the list goes on.

I can live without Google but Google can't survive without use. Thanks but no thanks.

=========================================

[Edited 6/15/13 22:57pm]

I've never used nor do I have an Google+ account, so I can't comment on that either way. But I still have a YouTube account and Google is still asking me for my phone number for security purposes with my gmail address (which I don't even used at all but to maintain a YouTube account!). If they think I'm ever going to change my mind, they can kiss my black ass!

I think the NSA scandal for now put the skids on Google insisting name and phone number.. for now. I don't use gmail. I'd recommend for all of our non geek audience not to use the same browser and email from the same service anyways. But I think they'll come back to wanting your name and phone number.... if Google insist I'll shut my account down for sure.

-----------------------------------------------

[Edited 6/17/13 17:14pm]

TonyVanDam said:

And yes, I'm still trying to encourge people to get off of the Microsoft Plantation and consider making to switich to Linux Microsoft's glory days ended right along with the support of Windows XP. But I'll save my bashing for the next thread.

Good for you. Same situation here. Hope we win!

novabrkr said:

How fast and how reliably Chromium runs depends entirely on your distribution (or, to be more precise, the way the packages it relies on are configured).

I wouldn't say I've been happy with the "official" packages for Chromium available in quite a while (I use the Debian repositories). I'm too lazy to attempt to fix it myself as many other browsers currently work so well without any extra work needed.

For now (6/17/2013), the current Chromium is at v27, just like the current Chrome stable. But if you want something faster, that would be Chrome beta & Chrome unstable. At the time of my opening post, I was using Chrome beta and it didn't have any bugs at all. And it was a few steps faster than Chromium.

Chromium v27 is currently in the Debian Testing & Sid repositories. If you want a faster Chromium, you could either make it yourself with a nightly build OR you can take a huge risk of upgrade Chromium from the Debian Experimential repositories whenever it's available.

TD3 said:

TonyVanDam said:

I've never used nor do I have an Google+ account, so I can't comment on that either way. But I still have a YouTube account and Google is still asking me for my phone number for security purposes with my gmail address (which I don't even used at all but to maintain a YouTube account!). If they think I'm ever going to change my mind, they can kiss my black ass!

I think the NSA scandal for now put the skids on Google insisting name and phone number.. for now. I don't use gmail. I'd recommend for all of our non geek audience not to use the same browser and email from the same service anyways. But I think they'll come back to the your wanting your name and phone number.... if Google insist I'll shut my account down.

I agree. But also, have plenty of back-up email accounts, each one from a different browser and/or ISP.