Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Chromium is Now Complete

Chromium the open source web browser on which Google Chrome is based is finally complete. When I first wrote about Chromium back in July, I found it to be a very fast and capable browser, but it lacked the features I needed to be productive on the web. Since then Chromium has finally reached the maturity level to compete with other major browsers, it now features:
- native GTK theming
- flash playback
- bookmark sync (through your google account)
- extensions

Extensions - Chromium

It will only be a matter of time until we see the most popular features of Firefox, Opera and other browsers make their way to Chromium via extensions. Until then I'll just enjoy Chromium's fast startup time and rendering engine.

For those not yet running Chromium installing the ppa is incredible simple in Ubuntu 9.10.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa
- to automatically add the Chromium PPA and GPG Key
sudo apt-get update
- update your sources
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
- install the browser and it's dependencies

If you running an older version of Ubuntu use this guide to manually install the Chromium Daily Build PPA.

sudo apt-get chromium-browser installs the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg package by default. This package contains only the free ogg, vorbis and theora codecs needed for the HTML5 audio/video tags. If you want to install the free ogg, vorbis, theora codecs, as well as, the non-free H.264, MP3 and AAC codecs install the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree package.

In a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree
- to install the browser and non-free codec together
sudo apt-get install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree
- to install the non-free repository after installing the Chromium browser.

You may be asking why I'm writing about Chromium when Google just announced Google Chrome Beta for Linux? I prefer to support Chromium because it is open source software and receives features before Google Chrome. The only real difference between the two browsers is the non-free codecs, and installing them in Chromium is easy. If you're not ready to take the Chromium plunge, you can install the Google Chrome browser by clicking here, n00b.


Have a question or problem that this article doesn't cover?
Ask our Ubuntu Mini 9 Google Group for help.

8 comments:

Don R Maxwell said...

Any pointers to enabling Java (jre) in Chromium? JRE is fine in FF but not launching in Chromium for me.

rudy_mills said...

I'd like to know this too...

Thanks for another great post, btw!

redDEAD said...

http://java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml

I installed java as part of the Ubuntu Restricted Extras Package:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

It installs the sun-java6-plugin. Works great for me.

Don R Maxwell said...

@redDEAD The page you referenced was exactly what I needed! Thanks!

Al said...

I'll stick with Firefox, thanks.

Unknown said...

I know that Chromium already has GTK+ theming, but I didn't exactly like the way it mapped the Dust theme to its own look. Therefore I read a little and created a Dust theme for it. Hopefully you find it to your liking. https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bmnhkobodnodgeogkjceeheondfmnjmd

P.S. Your site has really helped me enjoy my Mini 10v. I'm a long time Ubuntu user but brand new the the netbook world.

Anonymous said...

Holy Chromium !

All the blessings to this wonderful gadget.

Buda said...

I really like chromium and want to fully remove firefox, but it seems to be in pieces on my netbook. As I'm updating my computer to 9.10 soon, any way I can avoid installing firefox in the first place?