Chromium-Based Spinoffs Worth Trying 185
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp takes an in-depth look at six Chromium-based spinoffs that bring privacy, security, social networking, and other interesting twists to Google's Chrome browser. 'When is it worth ditching Chrome for a Chromium-based remix? Some of the spinoffs are little better than novelties. Some have good ideas implemented in an iffy way. But a few point toward some genuinely new directions for both Chrome and other browsers.'"
6 spinoffs (Score:5, Informative)
6 more goofy names that mean nothing (internet explorer? ok, Netscape Navigator? ok, SRWare Iron, Comodo Dragon, Iceweasel? wtf)
ps here is the print version, so you dont have to wade through 6 ad infested pages
http://www.infoworld.com/print/184923 [infoworld.com]
Re:6 spinoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, those names are so weird and have no relation to web-browsing.
Excuse me while I use Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously. This complaint is so tired.
Excel? PowerPoint? Even "Word" isn't all that informative. Flash, Acrobat, Java, etc, etc. And these are the ones that everyone's mother might have heard of.
If someone cares enough to try an application they aren't familiar with, they'll probably hear about these alternatives and add them to their vocabulary. I've never once overheard someone actually complain or become confused by a name that wasn't in the form of "[Application Domain] [Verb]", *except* on forums
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An iceweasel is the opposite of a firefox
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I've been wondering when /. would do a story on this. I've been using Iron as my secondary browser for when something doesn't work in Firefox. If you want more stable version of Chromium that protects your privacy better than Chrome Iron is a pretty good option.
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Iron does not really protect you any better than plain Chromium. All it does is bring ad revenue to the pretty dishonest guy who makes it.
It is not a good option for anything. Just use Chromium if you don't trust Google.
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The original IBM PC, Apple Mac, Commodore Amiga browser wasn't particularly informative either
Mosaic.
Of the browsers listed in the article, the only useful ones appear to be Chromium (no google spying) and Rockmelt (social media integrated). They could have shorted this to a 2 item list. 3 if they included Flock.
A story about Mozilla/Gecko would be far more interesting. There are about 15 different browsers which use that as its base.
Re:6 spinoffs (Score:5, Informative)
It was a pretty immature and petty thing to do, but well within their rights.
They had no choice. Debian, being a free distro, couldn't use Firefox's non-free logo. So they didn't, and Mozilla decided to give them the finger:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project#Origins_of_the_issue_and_of_the_Iceweasel_name :
In February 2006, Mike Connor, representing the Mozilla Corporation, wrote to the Debian bug tracker and informed the project that Mozilla did not consider the way in which Debian was using the Firefox name to be acceptable.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure they did. For one thing they could have chosen a more respectful name. And for a second thing plenty of free software projects are perfectly fine with those terms. It's just that the Debian developers were being self centered assholes.
Additionally, a trademark is not something that the GPL grants you. If they chose to use the trademark, then they had to agree to provide the same Firefox as everybody else. This is normal. When there is a fork there is normally a change of name. Patches are normally sent
Re:6 spinoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
Not people using, people redistributing.
Minor nitpick.
Re:6 spinoffs (Score:4, Informative)
No definitely not. Debian do nothing wrong in respect of the GPL or other licenses. Unlike the FSF they don't write licenses and so it is in no respect hypocritical for them to class some licenses as incompatible with the project.
The license grant for the Firefox name and branding is incompatible with the methods of the Debian project. For Debian stable the application code is frozen before a release is declared stable, the only changes allowed are direct bug fixes and security fixes. The license for the Firefox branding requires that only unmodified code is used to build the executables so that the firefox developers are not chasing bugs in other people's code that they don't have.
Both of these stances are good and reasonable, but Debian will not accept 'the current build' of firefox into stable just to fix a minor bug and Mozilla will not allow a version with an unverified 'minor bug bug fix' to be branded 'Firefox'.
Incompatible
As for the name; neither Debian nor Mozilla care. The just want something that's not 'fire fox'; 'ice cat', 'ice dog', 'ice bear' ... all have Google hits.
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Actually, I think Mozilla refused to even allow Debian to backport security-critical bugfixes to older versions of Firefox and still call it that.
Re:6 spinoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure it is, if you want to package something that's not Firefox, but just uses 99.9% of the code you typically just fork it. Or you do like Linux Mint and change the name and add a patchset over the top.
I seriously wonder if the Debian guys would be cool if I took their source modified it in a few subtle ways and then released it as "Debian." I could be wrong, but I doubt very much that they would be cool with it, because what I'd be distributing wouldn't be Debian and they'd have to deal with the consequences if things went wrong.
Great idea ... (Score:2, Flamebait)
... now we can have the same security bugs as Chrome/Chromium but without any timely fixes!
And none with a decent interface. (Score:5, Interesting)
The interface is what ruins Chrome, how come no one bothers to fix it? A good interface is consistent, internally and externally: the app must belong with the operating system around it. Chrome is alien in any system, it does not have the same window borders, menu bar, or anything else as every other app. That's tolerable from a tiny indie team, like jDownloader, but from a megacorporation like Google this is simply cringeworthy.
Re:And none with a decent interface. (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore the fact is that chrome's ui is quickly becoming the standard browser ui. Both IE 9 and Firefox whatever the hell version they are at now look very similar to it.
Re:And none with a decent interface. (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome's UI is not the most intuitive but I like how minimalistic it is, and how it saves the most amount of screen space for the actual task at hand: viewing web pages.
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2. Navigate to web page.
3. Press F11. OMG ALL TEH BUTTONZ IZ GAWN!
I use Chrome at work as it's fastest at rendering JS heavy content (ticketing and inventory system), Comodo Dragon and Firefox at home. Horses for courses.
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My screen is 1920x1080 and I definitely DO care.
If you're using the internet for work, you might have the browser use only a small part of screenspace.
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Operating-system-style widgets and the like make sense for users, but Google makes Chrome for the benefit of Google first and users second.
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Chrome's interface is why I use it. It takes up less space and gets the bullshit out of my way. There is no reason to devote the entire top of my screen to the name of the application and the minimize, maximize, close buttons, when the only name I care about is the title of the website I'm currently looking at, and I have all these tabs I need to have displayed. Chromes interface makes sense
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Pff, still too much useless chrome. This [softpedia-static.com] is a reasonable browser UI.
Re:And none with a decent interface. (Score:4, Informative)
The interface is what ruins Chrome, how come no one bothers to fix it? A good interface is consistent, internally and externally: the app must belong with the operating system around it. Chrome is alien in any system, it does not have the same window borders, menu bar, or anything else as every other app. That's tolerable from a tiny indie team, like jDownloader, but from a megacorporation like Google this is simply cringeworthy.
Chrome ignoring the system's window decorations to build its own isn't just annoying, it's an accessibility and usability nightmare. If a user is disabled and needs, for example, larger close/minimise/etc buttons, Chrome's custom decorations still draw at their own size regardless of system setting. It also puts the window control buttons in the same place regardless of how your system is set up, so a user with motor control problems is going to be more likely to hit the wrong button by mistake due to the close placement and small size.. Since it ignores colour scheme, too, that means users that need high-contrast themes are screwed there, too.
These problems are especially obvious in KDE, because Kwin allows you to change button placement and decoration size. Even for a user without disabilities, the fact that Chrome and Chromium completely override your settings and does what it wants is a usability killer. I have custom window decoration placement, size, and a dark theme, so Chromium is absolutely horrible to look at by default.
Luckily, Chromium has two useful appearance options under the "Personal Stuff" section that mitigates this. You can choose "Use GTK+ theme" to get your system colours, and "Use system title bar and borders" to put your window manager back in control. No idea if it works in Windows, but it was a huge improvement for me in Debian.
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Luckily, Chromium has two useful appearance options under the "Personal Stuff" section that mitigates this. You can choose "Use GTK+ theme" to get your system colours, and "Use system title bar and borders" to put your window manager back in control. No idea if it works in Windows, but it was a huge improvement for me in Debian.
I installed Chromium just today on my KDE Arch box and it had "Use system titlebar and borders" turned on by default.
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Well, Chrome looks pretty much like the rest of the UI on my Vista box.
Only things missing are the icon top-left and the missing window title.
Firefox has a non-standard menu button branded "Firefox" top-left in the otherwise normal, title-less titlebar.
Opera looks pretty much the same as Firefox, but with a "Opera" branding on the button.
IE9 has the same empty titlebar as Chrome with some non-standard round buttons beneath it.
Each of these nicely uses the OS style and each has their own minor inconsistancie
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If you have to hunt and peck for hidden menus and separately learn how each app you want to use works, then you might as well use more powerful command line and terminal apps straightaway. They are just as heterogeneous, but the programmers didn't waste 80% of their development time contorting the functionality into an outdated o
Oops. (Score:2)
InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp takes an in-depth look at six Chromium-based spinoffs that bring privacy
I read that as "piracy". Too much news on the same topic, I suppose.
Customization (Score:5, Informative)
Until Firefox somehow becomes totally unusable or Chrome actually lets me change basic settings, I'm sticking with Firefox.
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Even basic settings like moving where the tabs are or fine-grained privacy settings are missing from Chrome and most Chrome derived browsers.
Hear ya. Chrome had tabs-on-side as a hidden beta feature for a while, but around xmas they removed it completely. Is there side tabs on any of the Chrome variants? For now, I'm with Opera, but frankly it's not the speed king anymore like it was in the day.
Re:when my Firefox session needs to be isolated (Score:2)
If you're talking about things like being logged into sites where all of the new instances of the browser "remember you are logged in", then why use Chrome at all if that's technically the reason to use SomeOtherBrowser? Just use both Firefox and a Spinoff! Firefox logged in doesn't know that Cometbird for example "is also Firefox" so you get browser isolation as desired.
I just want a sensible UI (Score:3)
I would love Chrome if it had a status bar instead of a status popup that covers page elements and a URL bar that either shows the http or doesn't include it when you copy and paste the URL (what kind of moronic...).
So, basically a browser that doesn't go out of its way to annoy me. Is there a version of Chrome like THAT?
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The heck is with you status bar fetishists? I don't feel compelled to burn ~20 precious vertical pixels, displaying nothing, just in case I might hover over a link.
Between you and the "every program must have a file menu" guys, you'd double the amount of chrome in Chrome and gain exactly zero functionality.
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May be you don't. For others, 20 pixels out of >1200 is not precious, but status bar flashing in and out and showing incomplete link URL is distracting and annoying.
Why not just make it configurable?
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Sure, if it's actually 1%.
But yeah, your attitude is exactly what's wrong with UI designers. "Requests? Configurability? Fuck you, exceptionally whiny bitches, you'll eat what I spit out and like it! Now excuse me while I try more Revolutionary Design Changes".
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Yes, it's 1%. Back in 2009, there were ~270 million [mozillazine.org] Firefox users. Only 150 thousand [mozilla.org] of them care about the status bar.
Given that not even 1% of Firefox users care about the status bar, I think the UI designers are entirely correct to say to say, quote, "fuck you, you exceptionally whiny bitches."
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You mean "only 150 thousand use that extension". That's different
First, 17% of FF users are still on 3.6 - sure, not everyone of them does that due to UI changes, but a sizable part of them cares.
Second, not everyone who cares cares and knows enough to find that extension. Some just try to get used, others change browsers.
So, yep, my point still stands, that's UI designers who don't care. User 1: "Meh, I'll hold on this version", User 2: "Meh, if they make it look like $otherproduct, why not just switch to
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Are you telling me Firefox users have problems finding extensions, especially when they're linked directly from the "what happened to the status bar" help topic [mozilla.org]? If they don't care enough to google "Firefox status bar", they don't count towards the "number of people who care about the status bar" statistic.
Even if you assume that every Firefox 3.6 user is on 3.6 solely because of the status bar, that means no more than six percent [arstechnica.com] of web users actually care.
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Why, we went from "whiny 1%" to "6 percent of web users" already - and 6 percent of web users is "whiny hundred million people". And then, what matters in decision to support/don't support a feature is not percentage of _web_ users, but percentage of _this program_ users. For FF it makes "whiny every one of five".
Same for Ubuntu and Unity, seems like they had "whiny every next one" [pingdom.com].
Because UI designers know better and users are just whiny.
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Only 156,000 people care enough to restore the old behavior.
Nope, 156,000 people restored old behaviour by installing this extension. Indeed, we don't know exactly how many users restored old behaviour by installing 3.6 and how many didn't restore old behaviour, but chose new browser with new behaviour instead. All we can observe is this pretty correlation between introduction of FF4 with radically changed UI [statcounter.com] and acceleration of FF's user share decline [statcounter.com]
As for your take on Unity or UX designers, I couldn't care less. I'm not a UX designer, my Linuces don't have GUIs, and none of that has anything to do with why Google should pander to an exceptionally small number of toxic users..
You seem to miss the point. UX design matters and "not pandering to an exceptionally small number of toxic users" s
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All we can observe is this pretty correlation between introduction of FF4 with radically changed UI and acceleration of FF's user share decline
Yes. The status bar is the only reason people are leaving Firefox or using 3.6. This is clearly a more reasonable figure than "number of people who actually turned the status bar back on."
both for you and many UX designers *snip*
I'm not a UX designer. I don't care what you think about them, and I don't care to defend the profession.
P.S.: And again you refer
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Yes. The status bar is the only reason people are leaving Firefox or using 3.6. This is clearly a more reasonable figure than "number of people who actually turned the status bar back on."
Aaaaand you still miss the point. Let me step you through. Status bar was a part of the FF UI overhaul, as well as many other changes. Some part of FF users didn't like the lack of status bar, some part didn't like something about the tabs or menu or ... FF didn't want to pander to all of those small groups, and so they left. And there we see, Firefox, which had stable 30-31% for all 2010 and beginning of 2011, lost 5% in 9 months since FF4.0. That's how it happens, spit on small groups, and they eventually
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Let's go back to my original reply, which is why Chrome doesn't have a status bar. With various evidence, I posited that:
You argue that Firefox is "spitting" on its users by changing the status bar. Why would Chrome changing its status bar be any different?
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I love it when I can reclaim some screen space (stuff the menus away where ever!). I don't love it when it comes at the expense of functionality.
Like status popups covering up part of a web page I'm trying to read. Which happens ALL THE %^@^% TIME.
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Like status popups covering up part of a web page I'm trying to read. Which happens ALL THE %^@^% TIME.
If you had the always-on status bar, you wouldn't have been able to those 20 pixels in the bottom left-hand corner anyway.
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Yeah, that's just wonderful until it displays while there is a viewable page, covering up elements at the bottom.
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Yeah, that's just wonderful until it displays while there is a viewable page, covering up elements at the bottom.
Which you also would not have seen with your always-on status bar.
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With always-on, you always have to scroll. With Chrome, you might have to scroll, if you can't wait for your page to finish loading.
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Why should you scroll, when the always-on status bar is already included when calculating window height?
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Why should you scroll, when the always-on status bar is already included when calculating window height?
Because you want to read what's behind the status bar? The post I replied to complained Chrome's (lack of) status bar might cover the text he was reading. My response was that an always-on status bar would always cover that text.
I'll leave why that would cause scrolling as an exercise to the reader.
Propaganda in Dragon against domain-validated SSL (Score:3)
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It's probably not some nefarious plot to sell certs, HTTPS is a good thing, but I agree that raising a warning for domain validated sites is a mistake. Any site that I trust enough to visit, I trust enough to use their certs.
Or, if you are going to start requiring user approval, do it for every site, instead of having a huge list of "legitamate businesses" who pay to be trusted by the browser automatically. I have never really understood why a trusted third-party is necessary.
Phishing Philter (Score:3)
Any site that I trust enough to visit, I trust enough to use their certs.
How do you know whether you trust a site enough to visit it? The cert could be for PayPaI.com (capital i looks like lowercase L) or xn--itibank-xjg.com (appears as citibank.com, though using a C-shaped Cyrillic s). Comodo could explain this away as part of Dragon's phishing filter.
Legitimate business checking (Score:2)
if an HTTPS site uses a certificate that's domain validated, Dragon raises a warning "that the organization operating it may not have undergone trusted third-party validation that it is a legitimate business."
I'm all in favor of checking whether a commercial site has an identifiable, legitimate business behind it. We do that with SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], and it filters out a huge number of junk sites. We divide SSL certs into three categories - "domain control only validated", "business validated", and "extended validation". A "domain control only" cert has no identify value. The CA/Browser Forum is formalizing this distinction with their new cert issuance guidelines. [cabforum.org] The 3 levels of certs are now an industry wide standard.
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I'm all in favor of checking whether a commercial site has an identifiable, legitimate business behind it.
That's fine, but what about legitimate, non-commercial sites that want to use HTTPS but neither can afford nor need an EV cert? Why downgrade them because they're not certified as something that they're not even pretending to be?
If you have ads, you're a business (Score:2)
Iron? Really? (Score:3)
Iron is a known scam [hybridsource.org]. If there is a reason to use Iron, it is not for its privacy related offerings. You're better off just using Chromium.
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I've seen that page many times already. Maybe the complaints were valid for an earlier version of the browser, but Iron is different enough than stock Chromium now. It leaves out the part about Iron successfully implementing adblock.ini. While there are other extensions for blocking ads, you're left with trying to find out which extension is the real one which stops them from loading, and not just an element hider. Then there are performance problems with some of the extensions, they simply can't handle
It's going to take... (Score:3)
... more then just a browser to get people to change. I've often wondered why TOR developers don't integrate something like bit-torrent like protocol combined with an anonymity service like onion routing and a browser all in one, anyone who is using the browser and wants to keep their privacy automatically becomes part of an anonymity swarm instead of having separate packages just have it all integrated and take the end user out of the loop. For most people that will do. For the power users they can download custom stuff like what is available now.
With all the bs going on with corporations owning the governments of the world and trying to take away peoples rights it's about time someone actually did something about it in terms of combining all the features into one complete package that grows more powerful/useful as people use it.
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Tried "Torbrowser"? It's a pack that lets you run a "Portable App" preconfigured custom build of Firefox Aurora 9, which automatically logs you into Tor before you use the browser. Really easy to use.
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I'm thinking of something for the masses - the masses dont want hassle at all, they want something like chrome that just hides in the background and auto-updates without fuss. Tor still has 'barriers to entry' in terms of it's use. You have to download it, start it up, then you have to 'manually' turn on whether you become a node or not. For just private browsing that's still too many steps for the masses. You want to take all the decisions completely out of the loop and have custom stuff like you talk
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The "Torbrowser" package from eff.org I mentioned does not manually require starting Tor, you just run something called "Start Tor Browser.exe", and it does everything for you, you just run it and start browsing. No need to "Start up tor", or "manually turn on" anything. It's a separate profile from your main Firefox profile.
But it doesn't auto-update. Some people think that's a privacy risk, so they exclude those kind of features.
Vidalia still starts up in the background, but it shuts down when you clos
Except...not (Score:2)
The article title is "alternatives are worth trying" and in fact the article summary is that whatever niche thing the alternatives do is usually easily do-able with the basic chromium and some addons. So really the author is saying they AREN'T worth the effort unless you have an obsessive need to address some trivial issue and downloading a whole new browser is easier for you than to modify the defaults yourself. (shrug)
they forgot... (Score:2)
Re:F-I-R-S-T (Score:5, Insightful)
Extra crap like a bundled closed-source Flash plugin?
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A new acme has been acheived. This article adds as much value, as the Chromium variants themselves.
In fact, this is the "RockMelt" of technology journalism!
Re:F-I-R-S-T (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly, RockMelt is the most significant entrant on the list. #1 is Chromium, #2 is SRWare Iron (the legitimacy of which remains under debate), #6 is just Chrome itself (brilliant list-padding idea guys; include the official branch not once but twice to pad your pitifully short list), #3 is Comodo Dragon (dumb new UI + hardcoded DNS), and #5 is a Chinese thing that throws in the same old IE Mode and mouse gestures that we've seen a billion times everywhere else. There aren't six Chrome "remixes" out there, there are two.
From now on I think all stories that start with a quantity of items being reviewed, or the fragment "top n", are going to be purged vehemently from my system with a bit of JS. Sad, sad, sad.
Re:Sadly (Score:2)
Nice recap of a Slashdot recap of what I discovered item by item a long time ago. I'll leave it to my betters to decide if Iron has any "evil" code snuck in, but otherwise it felt that most of the Chromium alternates are boring.
Disclosure: I'm still a Firefox fan myself, so maybe all browser spinoffs are boring, but somehow the FF ones feel more varied. I'm on Cometbird at the moment, which has the amusing side feature among other things of blocking Hulu's ads, so if I'm watching shows there I get 2 min of
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The world can ding Firefox all it wants. Yes. I too have the endless memory leakage.
Nothing else can be as ng.significantly customised for my utility and privacy. Nothing.
Nor does anything else manage tabs as elegantly. Yes, I'm the person with 30-80 in a session, and cull them over weeks. It beats any "bookmarks". :-)
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Not just that, but it's a bundled closed-source Flash plugin that isn't available to users of Chromium and its spin-offs, plus it has an additional bundled closed-source PDF reader plugin from Adobe that not only isn't available to Chromium users but also has no viable replacement.
yeah, only a couple gigabytes (Score:2, Interesting)
of various hodge podge pieces of source code all mashed together in an uncompilable, mountainous sploodge vomit of bizarre perversions of the once innocent C language
Re:yeah, only a couple gigabytes (Score:4, Funny)
You mean C++?
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Re:F-I-R-S-T (Score:5, Informative)
Define "extra crap".
Chrome, includes Flash and PDF plugins, no extra functionality, 82M installed.
Mozilla, no Flash, no PDF, no extra functionality, 38M.
Opera, no Flash, no PDF, built-in news reader/mail, URL-based adblocker and a bunch of other stuff commonly installed as extensions on FF/Chrome - fits it all in 35M
Can you spell "b-l-o-a-t"?
How big is SeaMonkey? (Score:2)
Perhaps the closest comparison to Opera might be SeaMonkey because it has the built-in mail and news client. How big is SeaMonkey installed?
On the other hand, with Google Groups, Facebook, and the like, who uses NNTP for text newsgroups anymore? And with the shutdown of Usenet providers due to rampant copyright infringement in binary groups, who uses binary newsgroups anymore? Facebook and Gmail have even been eating into the SMTP/IMAP market.
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Perhaps the closest comparison to Opera might be SeaMonkey because it has the built-in mail and news client. How big is SeaMonkey installed?
42M. Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't include anything like AdBlock/FlashBlock/NoScript (Opera has URL filter and "load plugins on demand"/"enable Javascript" configurable on site-per-site basis out of the box)
On the other hand, with Google Groups, Facebook, and the like, who uses NNTP for text newsgroups anymore? And with the shutdown of Usenet providers due to rampant copyright infringement in binary groups, who uses binary newsgroups anymore?
Not me, for sure. So much "not me", in fact, that I forgot about NNTP (which Opera handles as well) and referred to RSS reader as "news reader".
Facebook and Gmail have even been eating into the SMTP/IMAP market.
Sure, that's question of preference. Some keep separate program, some are happy with browser tab, I find it convenient to have RSS and mail in browser
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Using your previous chart:
Chrome, includes Flash and PDF plugins, no extra functionality, 82MB installed.
Mozilla/Firefox, no Flash, no PDF, no extra functionality, 38MB.
Opera, no Flash, no PDF, built-in news reader/mail, URL-based adblocker and a bunch of other stuff... fits it all in 35MB
Mozilla/seaMonkey, no Flash, no PDF, built-in news reader/mail, built-in HTML editor, built-in Javascript editor, website debugging, built-in IRC, 42MB (Basically it's an updated version of the old Netscape.)
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Define "extra crap".
Chrome, includes Flash and PDF plugins, no extra functionality, 82M installed. Mozilla, no Flash, no PDF, no extra functionality, 38M. Opera, no Flash, no PDF, built-in news reader/mail, URL-based adblocker and a bunch of other stuff commonly installed as extensions on FF/Chrome - fits it all in 35M
Can you spell "b-l-o-a-t"?
Opera has Unite built in, which includes a web server, file sharing service, chat and other sharing collaboration tools. Opera has always been a excellent browser that is doomed to be forever underrated.
Frankly I'm waiting for a browser with something like Diaspora built in.
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35M is pretty fucking huge for a web browser.
why?
Re:F-I-R-S-T (Score:4, Interesting)
And some browsers also include pack-in:
It doesn't seem unreasonable browsers require 30-50MB footprint to supply all this and I'm not sure why anyone be splitting hairs over the difference.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Comodo Dragon (Score:2)
Nice notes. I had Comodo Dragon installed for a while, I only later removed it on a simplifying run. But you're spot on about the agendas: Even if *at the moment* Chrome is only "schoolyard evil", because it's the flagship browser of Google, any random day they could gleefully tweak some of the internals so that it contributes to that new super-surveillance mission they just announced. Comodo is a Security Company, so even if they make a mistake in one build that lets data through to somewhere, their guidel
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sigh (Score:3)
Re:Oh boy! (Score:4, Informative)
IE9. Microsoft has matured with its browser from the medieval times of IE5.
Speaking as an end-user; no, it hasn't.
Speaking as a web developer; no, it hasn't.
Use Firefox, Opera, Safari or Chrome. Not IE in any version.
Not yet anyway, IE9 is far better than previous IE's, so I've got some hope for IE10.
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Except that calling chromium a chrome spinoff would be like calling your engine a car spinoff. Chrome IS chromium, it just has some bits tacked on.
Re:SRWare Iron (Score:4, Interesting)
Is Iron a Scam? Yes [hybridsource.org]
Outdated blog: Re:SRWare Iron (Score:3)
First point:
Just because there were only minor changes, doesn't make it a scam.
Second point:
This is based on some blog back when it was based on vers 5 of chrome sources. It is currently based on vers 16.. This is wildly out of date.
I use Iron Portable ver 16 as a backup browser and it does exactly what it should. Installs nothing in your system, except in the install directory, doesn't call home like Googles version and is a perfectly good alternative browser.
It is not a scam, because some outdated blog s
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The blog is basing their assertions based on the publicly available logs of a conversation between the guy that "makes" Iron and the Chromium developers. Whether it's a scam or not, I dunno. But it's undeniable that the Iron guy only made it so that he could pick up a few bucks from Adsense for doing nothing.
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Wow, people are still falling for the SRWare scam???
And what's wrong with the many adblock extensions available for Chrome??
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I asked this the last time it came up:
Do the adblock extensions actively stop the URLs from being accessed, or do they simply hide the images/kill accesses in progress?
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Do the adblock extensions actively stop the URLs from being accessed, or do they simply hide the images/kill accesses in progress?
Both the extension and SRWare Iron merely hide the images as they are requested.
Iron's adblocking was noteworthy before Chrome had extensions, but nowadays there is no functional difference between the two AFAIK other than blocklist auto-updates.
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I pipe all my browsing through Privoxy. Regardless of browser, I don't see any adverts.
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Chromium does. Just use that.
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Pinky curl while moving hand from mouse (Score:2)
You could argue that Ctrl+F only needs the left hand
Ctrl+F is a pinky curl and finger spread on Windows and Linux, and Cmd+F is a thumb curl on a Mac. Should I photograph my hand executing these chords?
allowing you to leave the right on the mouse, but unless you're going to type the search one-handed*, it's not really beneficial.
I find myself pushing Ctrl+F while my right hand is traveling from the mouse to the JKL; keys. With "/", you can't start the gesture until your right hand is all the way onto the keyboard. Another bonus: Ctrl+F works even while an editable field (URL bar, <input type="text">, or <textarea>) happens to be focused, which is helpful when looking for t