Posts Tagged ‘browsers’


Google Chrome (alpha) – fastest browser for Debian

Friday, July 10th, 2009

I’ve just tested Google Chrome for Linux on my Debian machine.
It has a nice theming feature, currently apparently suitable and used for making Chrome look native. That is, out of the box includes Chrome’s default theme, and the GTK theme which uses GTK buttons where possible, and uses the theme colors for Chrome-style widgets. On the screenshot, you can see how it looks with Debian-colored Clearlooks. Also, here’s a shot of the default theme.
(Update 5:51PM, CET: I didn’t figure out there’s a way to actually turn off the system window borders. There is. Wooo! Chrome is awesome.)
Most of the UI is GTK based – menus, configuration options, etc.
Dragging tabs around works nicely, just as under Windows; even transparency, if you have a compositing window manager such as Compiz. (Hint: KWin and Metacity also include compositing; I’m not sure where to turn it on for Metacity in the GUI, but it has a command line option “-c”.)

Google’s warning: Unless you’re a developer and can suffer crashes, as well as able to suffer lack of privacy features, don’t download and use this. It’s a developer’s preview only.
But seeing how great this browser already became (being significantly faster feeling than Iceweasel/Firefox on Linux, at least the 3.0 series) I’m getting great, great vibes for this browser’s future on GNU/Linux.
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Narrowminded engineers, interesting composition

Monday, October 29th, 2007

It has become a nice industry practice to support browsers other than Internet Explorer. Namely Mozilla Firefox. Yet, since Mozilla is also evil, and its browsers don’t integrate as neatly as some other browsers, and its browsers are having speed/memory deficiencies, I am also using Opera and Konqueror. Opera is much faster and a bit less memory hungry in most cases. Konqueror neatly integrates with KDE. (Anyone knowing me knows that I tend to switch between GNU/Linux desktop managers, so my use of Konqueror is surely not constant.)

While Opera seems to work pretty nicely, I am disturbed by the fact that there are numerous issues with many Google’s services when used in Konqueror. Let me just remind you that Konqueror uses KHTML. Safari also uses KHTML (or at least some part of it). It’s nice to know that Blogger‘s rich textbox is completely uneditable with Konqueror. Google Groups don’t have a functioning reply button. Gmail is opened in the old-looking HTML-only interface, intended for text-mode browsers such as Links, or otherwise limited browsers.

QA rings so loudly.

YouTube is also very interesting:

Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.

Since I’m very annoyed when people are narrow-minded, especially engineers at companies such as YouTube/Google, let me point out the other possible causes:

  • I have never installed Flash player, so I don’t have an old version either!
  • I have turned off Netscape plugins in browser options (namely Konqueror) since they (namely Flash) were causing browser to crash

It’s the second thing.

And while at YouTube, make sure you listen to John Cage’s composition called 4″ 33′. It’s enlightening and inspiring.

[This is syndicated content. Read my blog at http://blog.vucica.net/ - please also leave comments there ]

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