I tried out chromium in the last 3 weeks. It is clearly faster then iceweasel/firefox . One one hand this is because of the architecture of chromium itself. People at google worked very hard to develop a competitive and lean browser. On the other hand, I think because on the firefox side I use a lot of extensions that can cripple performances and make the comparison a bit unfair. I should try yo start from scratch with with iceweasel using a clean profile and see how it goes.
Since everybody is trumpeting about this new browser I felt obliged to give it a try. Well… it doesn’t cut it for me.
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The first big problem for me is that there is no easy way to clean up the cache, browsing history, cookies, etc on exit. Call me paranoid, but I think this is an essential feature for a browser. Yes, it is true that this can be done manually and there is even a (windows-only) extension to clean up everything for you, but I find ridiculous that this simple feature cannot be added by default. The people at google are justifing this saying that since chrome has a very aggressive cache strategy, cleaning up the cache every time can lead to a slower user experience. Granted, this can be true, but I think an option should be there nonetheless and let the user choose if they want a clean start every time or the want to leave cookies and stuff lying around the disk. Other people simply say that google doesn’t want such a feature in the browser as it would cripple google tracking tools and lower their advertising revenue. I can see that this can be true, and I hope the community will step and patch (if not fork) the main trunk to add more sensible defaults. For a while I’ve solved this browsing in incognito mode, but this adds other nuisances…
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The second problem I’ve encountered is the lack of a good ads blocker. There are few around, but none of them are still up to speed with the quality of the ads blocker in the firefox world. I lived in an ads free world for a while and getting back to the horribly blinking and colorful websites where finding the information you are looking for is more difficult than to navigate a maze, is not acceptable for me.
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Third problem is the Cntl-F problem. there is a feature request that is marked as WontFix just because the forward slash (that for me is the more natural way yo search in a page) conflicts with gmail. Again. It’s a choice. But adding the possibility to change the default behavior would be the most sensible thing to do instead of marking the request as a won’t fix and ignore the outcry of the community.
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Then there is the lack of extensions. Well, to be fair, the extensions that I was looking for maybe are not very google friendly. In particular on firefox there is a google anonymity that does a nice job removing all sort of cookies and avoiding tracking thought the google services. Another extension that I’m missing is Ubiquity, that despite being abandoned by the mozilla labs, I find extremely useful and powerful to speed up my contextual searches.
In conclusion I think chromium is not there for me yet. There are too many downside to justify the move. I’m sure I would reconsider my position in 6 months and I really hope that the google developers will show a bit more of support for the community.