Google Chrome for Linux goes stable | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome for Linux goes stable

blog.chromium.org

130 pointsigorgue72 comments

If anyone from the Chrome/Chromium team is reading this, I want to say a big "Thank you". Chrome is great software, and it's making my life better (I probably spend something like 50-60 hours a week in it). I'm sure it's the case for many others too. Keep up the good work!

You're welcome :)

Also triple thankyou for actually producing packages of your work rather than 'here's a tarball, or wait 6 months for your distro to do it' like Firefox does.

Those packages are great, my only complaint is that they (at least the Debian ones) don't include a changelog file. It would be great to see what's new through the standard Debian facility when they release new versions.

They also install in /opt - which is wrong when you are using the packaging system for your distribution. They also make a number of other changes to the system.

Much better to install the official debian ones - they are less likely to mess with your system, and whoever is releasing them seems to keep up with the releases, so you are not behind.

http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/chromium-browser.html

/opt is the correct place to install if the package is not strictly speaking an officially sanctioned package.

Less chance of interfering with an overlapping package supplied by the distribution.

At least, /opt is part of the FHS, to which Debian adheres.

http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/amd64/apcs02.html

My understanding is that /opt is for programs that do not use the package manager. For example if you download a .tar file, and it has an installation script.

If it uses the package manager it goes in /usr like a regular program.

Actually that's what /usr/local is for.

That's for packages you install manually without an install script.

According to, IIRC, either Randy Russell or Alan Cox a decade ago, /opt was added to the FHS at the request of the proprietary Unix vendors. The idea of 'optional' 'third party' software is ridiculous in an Open Source OS. Throwing binaries, libraries, config etc. outside standard folders means long library paths, long binary paths, config that can't be backed up from a central location, etc.

Eg, say Debian include Chrome (as Chrome, not Chromium) in their next release. It will move from where it is now to the normal locations for unimportant software beneath /usr.

That said, I don't really care that much anymore. There's very little expectation for quality finished software on Linux in general:

* Most apps aren't packaged, even for the two major distros people use

* half of GUI apps still don't install with shortcuts

* WMs still invent their own .desktop replacements

* package descriptions for 'foobar' are 'the foobar package' or 'libtoolkit GUI for libfoobar'

* service descriptions are 'starts the foobar service'

* man pages either don't exist, point elsewhere or consist of 'debian says we have to have a man page, this is a man page, alas it has no content'.

I can't find the link, but I know the openSuSE build service has a repository with the latest Firefox for SuSE because I use it on my computer.

Congratulations on great work! Alas Chrome had been unusable for me on Linux for the last couple of months... but this post just spurred me to find out why. Turned out my bookmark file was large - 6,000 items - with one particular bookmark (ironically an official Google blog entry on making your website faster) having gone forth and multiplied over 5,000 times. (perhaps aided by a bug in an unstable version?) The unfortunate and frustrating effect being that, on installing Chrome on a new computer - something I've done several times recently - everything would work fine until the sync kicked in. At which point opening or closing tabs would go 100% CPU for over a minute. It's only now in trying to save my bookmark file to try out this new version that I discovered the problem. Happy to be back!

Any idea when application shortcuts are coming to the Mac? :)

Also wanted to say thanks, especially for making all user-tracking optional.

In addition, I'm really happy to see Apple and Google keep cooperating on making WebKit better. Together you've now built the best desktop and mobile browser technology.

Hug whoever put in auto-translation, from me. Thats the best idea anyone has had in a browser since extensions or possibly tabs. I <3 u.

Adblock on Chrome is still seriously imperfect, for two reasons

1. It takes a while to hide things (it also has a "hide too much, and un-hide later" mode, but that's barely an improvement).

2. The big one: it still downloads things. Let me be clear here: I don't want to have to wait for doubleclick to get off its ass and serve me an ad. I want the page all the way loaded when the bits I'm going to see are there. Which does not include adverts. I assume this is pending on Chrome adding a "pretty please may I?" hook to URL fetching - does anyone know when this will be here?

Browsers should just display content. Filtering proxies should filter out ads and other unwanted content before it ever gets to the browser.

Javascript can always be used to smuggle unwanted content into the DOM. And there are far too many badly-written sites out there for most users to be willing to block Javascript entirely.

Filtering proxies don't know Javascript or Flash. I also don't want to worry about the parsing and semantic differences between the proxy and the browser: a lot of differences might arrise.

Putting ad-blocking inside the browser seems the most logical part, especially since you get the DOM already made so you know you look at the same data.

The only browser as minimalist as you seem to want is this one http://www.uzbl.org/

In all other browsers, they are basically a web OS. Stripping adverts out of web pages is well within a browser's remit. In particular, deciding what not to download is within their remit.

does anyone know how to intercept a download IPC call in Chromium?

It’s also finally stable for Mac: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-chrome-stable-release...

The stable Mac version has better idle CPU usage. Doesn't cause my MBP fans to crank up so often.

IMHO chrome is the first and only serious linux web browser. It doesn't have this sluggish feeling that firefox linux has. The situation certainly isn't the same on windows, where firefox graphic performance is decent.

All in all, a big thank you to the chrome devs from a linuxer

I'm a fan of Konqueror myself. For some reason nobody seems to use it. Konqueror is stable, fast, doesn't use much memory and renders everything just fine.

Given Chrome's tab and menu positions, Chrome feels great with XMonad.

(Posted via Chrome x86_64 :))

I was quite happy with Firefox + Vimperator. All I show is a tab bar on the top and status bar on the bottom. It was great for XMonad.

I'll try out Chrome + Vimium for a bit, see how it works with my workflow and the muscle-memory of Vimperator keybindings.

I'm a recent convert from Firefox (I still use Firefox sometimes), I use Chrome on all three systems that I use every week, I just wish Chrome had something like about:config from Firefox.

The main thing I miss is the powerful addons. I'd love TreeStyleTabs and a fully featured Vimperator (command line included) for Chrome, but it's just not possible.

There are several Vim plugins. None of them have all of the features of Vimperator, but they are getting there.

Yes, I use Vimium when I use Chrome. However, it's still missing a number of features from it's Firefox counterpart, like the command line to input more complex commands that aren't mapped to a single key. Currently, it can only execute commands mapped to a keycombination, but it has no extended commands like the : commands of Vimperator. I should have gone more in depth about what I meant there.

I talked with a Windows UI designer on the Chromium team at Google I/O who is working on tree tabs. Should at least be an option pretty soon in the dev channel.

This is excellent news; thank you. I'll go see what I can find on that. If you talk to them again, let them know there's definitely interest in that.

There is probably some discussion around this on the chromium-dev or chromium-discuss lists in the chromium.org Google groups. I haven't checked though.

How much work would it be, maybe through an extension and maybe not, to arrange for individual tabs to suspend and resume after being idle for a period of time? On Linux and OSX, at least, this might be done via SIGSTOP and SIGCONT, or perhaps using a more sophisticated scheme. Although it'd come at the cost of Chrome's responsiveness, I expect that it'd be a net win.

For now, I use a script to kill the helper processes and reload the ones I'm interested at the time. Effective, but a blunter tool than I'd like all the same.

Has anybody been able to pin this down to a particular version number?

5.0.375.55

I use Chrome on Linux every day, and I love it, but I'm skeptical. In fact, just yesterday it chewed up my profile and I have yet to be able to recover it. Right now I'm leaning toward a corrupt SQLite database.

Weird, that just happened to me, too. No history, no cookies, and won't populate them, either (eg., no "most visited thumbnails" in the home page).

As a BSD user, I recall some of the porting problems were because of the reliance of ALSA instead of OSS. Anybody know offhand if it still uses ALSA?

Yes, sound on Linux is still using ALSA. The BSD work is all from contributions I believe. We have a 'media/audio/openbsd', but the contents appears to just be a stub.

Yet for me, the developer console still won't show Ajax requests for inspection. This is on 64-bit Ubuntu Lucid. Anyone else have this problem?

Never had that problem. It's always just worked. Has it ever worked for you, or have you seen it work on someone else's chrome install?

It worked in the past, but at some point stopped. I made use of it quite often, but only noticed last week it had stopped. I uninstalled/reinstalled, but no dice. Appears a few others are having it as well (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=40987). I'm going to blow away ~/.config/google-chrome and see if that fixes it.

I love having ajax requests show up in the console too. Chrome used to do it like you said but doesn't seem to show up anymore. You can still see the requests though if you go to the "resources" tab. On the left pane you'll find the url to the request you've made where you can view its headers and response content in the main pane. I guess the url as a "resource" is technically correct, but it's so much easier/nicer having it on the console. HTH

What about integrating Adobe PDF? Does Adobe Reader still requires dances around to show something besides a gray screen?

Great. Now if there was a flashblocker that actually works, maybe I could switch.

The FlashBlock extension works well for me. Give it a try:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gofhjkjmkpinhpoi...

It blocks like maybe 25% of all flash for me. Not adequate at all.

Something is wrong with your setup. I have been using that flash blocker for 2-3 months now and it blocks 100% flash objects for me both on mac and Windows, haven't tried it on Linux yet.

Well, I've tried it on Mac, Linux and Windows and it only blocks a minority of all flash files I've encountered. It seems especially bad with youtube and vimeo files embedded in blog posts.

In fact, I don't think it really can work in any real sense as an actual blocker since chrome doesn't provide an API for that. As I understand it, the best it can do is to remove the flash after the page has rendered.

There are at least 3-4 competing extensions on Chrome so I'm sure there's a variability in the quality of them. This one has worked well for me:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdngiadmnkhgemki...

But what you've said is true, FF's FlashBlock has much better control over Flash because of the control it has via the API. Chrome doesn't offer the same level of control to extensions, so they're all just going rewrite the page on load. That's been good enough for me though.

The point of Flashblock and NoScript is security without sacrificing usability on trusted sites. Yes, it lets you ignore the Flash, but it doesn't actually protect you because the Flash is still loaded.

The best Flash-blocking extension is to just not bother installing Flash in the first place.

It comes preinstalled though.

its built-in. scripts,cookies,flash,images,pop-ups all have built-in support to be blocked. you just turn them off and whenever a page blocks it, an icon will show up in the right end of the url bar. clicking that icon lets you manage the rights of that particular site.

I'm completely lost here. Are you saying this is built into Chrome without an extension? I've definitely never noticed anything like this. Got a post or link I can see somewhere?

Seconded. Can't find anything like this in the release version of the Mac build.

Chrome -> Wrench menu ("Customize and control") -> Options -> Under the Hood -> Privacy -> Content Settings -> Plug-ins -> Disable individual plug-ins -> Disable Shockwave Flash.

If you're autoupdating Chrome, you have to get in a habit of checking the settings menu periodically for new stuff. Unlike the more mature FireFox settings menu, Chrome's is still getting additions.

Unless I'm missing something this isn't anywhere near the functionality of Flash Block. Flash Block puts a placeholder in the spot of any SWF file it would load, and then lets me click to load the file if I want to see it, or quickly whitelist the site if I always want it to be able to load flash.

This appears to be just be turning flash on or off globally (and not very quickly either). FF has that level of control out of the box as well.

Yes it doesn't offer all the functionality yet, but it will get better I'm sure.

Flashblock has been available for chrome for ages.

http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/flash...

turn it off. then you can quickly whitelist each site as you get to it from the icon in the right of the url bar.

the only difference that i know between this and what you explained is the lack of a placeholder image.

If a site has one flash video I want to watch and a bunch a flash crap surrounding it that I don't want, it's nice to able to just unblock the video and not have to whitelist the entire site.

Thanks... this definitely works well enough for me. I definitely didn't expect the feature to be this accessible based on the menu settings.

And how do I turn it back on for the site I'm visiting?

I've found Privoxy to be a good ad- and flash-blocking solution for browsers that can't block well enough themselves.

Where the stable version for RHEL-5?

What is the reason to use RHEL as a desktop instead of Fedora?

RedHat enterprise support with long term stable updates that won't disappear and force you to upgrade in a few month time?

Some people argued that there is Sun's enterprise support for Solaris and blah-blah-blah. =) Where is the [Open]Solaris now? (Do not even try to tell that it is alive - no activity, no community support, no device driver updates or even patches - the very dead. =)

two hints: There is the CentOS, which have a much cheaper support (free updates + community support). =)

Fedora 12 (even 13) is pretty stable and actively supported system. They got less hype than Ubuntu (they don't have so much money for promotion and advertisement) but it is not just a testing branch of RHEL (look at RHEL6 beta - it is Fedora 12), it is probably the best distro available. (Think about it to become a RHEL with maturation - this is the main advantage over ubuntu which will become only yet another ubuntu. =)

Also, Chrome for Mac is now stable.

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