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



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.

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