Chromium for Linux (Google Chrome for Linux)

Technically, from a branding scenario, Chromium isn’t Chrome. Ignore that for a moment. Chromium is out for Linux. It is a new/alternative browser for Linux. It is much better than firefox in terms of raw speed. And from the memory leaks I have seen in the latest FF, and the instability of the program (its a crap shoot as to whether it will load a page or not, not to mention all the rendering bugs) … Chromium, in its current pre-alpha state, is a better browser than FF. And Chromium isn’t finished. No, I mean that literally … open the options, and you get a big “to do”. Or load a site with flash content and you get large blank boxes. But the rest of the browser? Fast. Not a little bit. I mean down right snappy fast. Complex page renders are fast. SSL is fast. Much faster than FF. Much much faster.

In fact, I am finding myself using FF2 in the form of IceCat32 far more than FF3 on my laptop these days, as FF2 is much faster (more stable too) than FF3. Even turning off all/most of the plugins/extensions doesn’t help. Removing cache? Helps a little. Once Chromium graduates to a full beta release, I’ll probably switch from FF. Been using FF for years. Mozilla before that. Netscape before that. I like cross platform code. I can run Thunderbird everywhere. I can run Chrom(e,ium) everywhere. And FF3, FF2, … Can’t run IE. Doesn’t work on Linux. Well, not strictly true, we have the Wine-ified IE6 and IE7 for web sites that seem to think the only browser is IE. But using Chrome on Windows when we use windows, and Chromium on Linux, I am left with the sense that FF is way behind the curve on usability, on performance, and on stability.