Hacker News Reader

Comment by kylec | Hacker News Reader

Let's hope this also means that a Linux version of Chrome is around the corner.

If you haven't tried out the chromium nightly desktop builds, they're actually quite nice. The team is still nailing down the plugins, but the browser itself is wicked fast and pretty stable (given its alpha nature)

I think stable for a web browser these days requires flash/java support, I don't know if this has been fixed or not in the builds though. Probably less on the java side and more on the flash.

If you're a Mac user, you can also download the latest nightly build here:

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-ma... (scroll all the way down to the latest build directory)

And yes, it is wicked fast. On my system, it doesn't even bounce in the dock before opening. It just opens. Plugins aren't supported yet, but I just open any sites that require Flash in Safari.

It's so fast OS X is unable to register it as a recently launched application for the magic folder in the dock...

Anyone knows why?

Just a guess, but maybe the weird process-per-tab thing.

> On my system, it doesn't even bounce in the dock before opening.

I think it doesn't bounce for a different reason. For example, Firefox doesn't bounce when it autoupdates. Everything should bounce for at least one time in normal conditions.

Even for a minimalistic web-browser Chromium is still rather lacking. While what used to be butt ugly font-rendering has gotten better, at least to the point of readable, as far as I can tell there is still no plugin support.

The only way you can fully configure the browser is still trough running gconf-editor for some parts, and configuring Firefox and then importing settings from there.

That being said, my biggest issue with the current chromium builds is that performance is truly horrible and majorly unstable. Sometimes things just works, snappy, as expected. But in more than 50% of the cases when opening a new page the entire browser locks, for what can be periods of up to 5 to 10 seconds. Wasn't process isolation supposed to fix this?

If this browser is going to be the "OS" for the web, in it's current state its closest equivalent would be Windows 3.11.

IMO Firefox 3.5 is a much better browser, while peak performance being somewhat slower, at least it performs predictably.

> horrible ... unstable

Wow - completely opposite from my experience. What are you running on? I'm on Ubuntu 8.10 right now, using the nightly builds.

I've had a tab lock up once or twice, but in general it's very nice, way faster than FF 3.0, and pleasant to use. The key bindings are the only thing that seems a bit wonky, but I'm generally happy and at some point may start using it as my main browser, if FF 3.5 isn't significantly better.

I'm running this on a Asus EEE 901 with Ubuntu Netbook remix running the nightlies.

My biggest issue is how the latency of the browser seems to vary between milliseconds and two-digit seconds. Performance is randomly varying over three orders of magnitude and that kind of performance instability is worse than performance being consistently "slow".

As for Firefox 3.5: It is much better.

Also the complete opposite of my experience. I used the nightly builds almost exclusively for over a week on Ubuntu 9.04 and I had no performance issues. Things are certainly incomplete but I was slightly disappointed to go back to the poorer performance of Firefox. I should probably place that blame on the Flash plugin but I think Chrome will handle this problem much better.

I had problems where after a few seconds it would completely crash X, drawing garbage all over the framebuffer, but it turned out that it was just triggering some bug in Compiz+Nvidia on Ubuntu.

Chrome wasn't built in a day.

Though you'd think if they're announcing a linux-based operating system, centered on their web-browser, making their web-browser run on linux would be trivial. OTOH, could it be the diversity of linux distributions that's making it difficult for them?

I don't get the impression that is actually a significant problem for anyone. Most distributions include the same libraries, recent kernels with similar options and even put things in similar places. Packaging is the major difference - though that's a job best left to the distributions anyway.

They have been working on the linux port for only 9 months porting what was essentially a native windows application written in Visual Studio. The fact that they got this far this fast shows that they have a pretty good team.

Since they say they're implementing a new windowing environment for this project, there may not be a lot of porting overlap between Chrome for Chrome OS and Chrome for your normal Linux distribution.

It would have to be Windowsy, unless Chrome has its own internal windowing layer that's a suitable general abstraction.

I assumed that "windowing environment" meant "window manager" not "GUI toolkit" anyway.

They should have bought plan9.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com