Chrome Browser for Linux: Worth a Shot

All browsers stink. Some are simply able to choke you less.

I am fully aware Google lies about compromising your privacy. Very early on I knew they were allied with the CIA and other clandestine agencies of the US government through investment funding, and they allow the likes of NSA full run of their massive data on Internet user habits. They threw a very public fit about China cracking their mail system, but I’m pretty sure NSA has carte blanche to read anything they please from that same mail system. If you are worried about privacy, stay off the Internet. Or, you can take my path, which is utter transparency. I don’t hide my despite for the US federal government, but I am no real threat, since my allegiance is utterly outside this world.

The real issue is not paranoid privacy, but keeping the advertisers from annoying you while you try to surf the web for information which actually matters. Aside from restricting yourself to plain text browsers, you can use browsers which permit a certain amount of crippling the normal browser functions. So I give kudos to Opera for allowing the placement of settings in the browser interface itself. Explore the various interface toolbars and discover you can put the cookies button there and turn them on or off depending on the sites you visit. Most websites still allow you to see them without any cookies at all. The Mozilla gang at least allows you to set the browser to ask you for each different server, and making them all session cookies is a nice option. The whole idea is avoiding advertisers using those websites as a way to assign you a tracking ID by which they present ever more intrusive advertising aimed at your “profile” of behavior. It’s creepy, unwarranted, and in my opinion justifies any action you can take to frustrate it.

These days I’m much more concerned with actual technical aspects. For example, we all hate Flash because it’s a resource hog. Worse, some of the most useful information is available only be video, which has become a very bad habit, since it often takes longer to extract it from the video viewing process than from simply a few lines of well written text. And you may probably be quite annoyed at the implementations of JavaScript because most sites overdo it. But when your browser also handles those things poorly, it only gets worse. These days, cookie games bother me less than just getting stuff done without pegging my dual-core CPU for mundane activities. On Linux, such things are easier to track (I use GKrellM).

The Mozilla gang changes their stuff so often, you might as well get used to building it yourself. Way too many Linux distros do not track Firefox properly when security fixes are released. Then again, Firefox makes no path for upgrading modular elements, so you have to build the whole darn thing. Fortunately, they at least make it fairly easy for mainstream distros with relatively easy instructions for those who have built anything at all from source. It works a whole lot better built on my machine: faster, sharper fonts, etc. I do it with every new release, primarily because the underlying rendering engine is the best there is for turning complex webpages into simple text. That’s about the only reason I use it.

Opera, as previously noted, is really simple to use, and allows a wealth of guerrilla settings. However, the most annoying thing is the very poor linking with browser plugins and the incomplete support for JavaScript. It’s great I can have buttons to toggle plugins, scripts, cookies, images, etc., but enabling them reveals how little the Opera developers understand Linux. The plugins are an ugly hack, at best. If you visit a site which has embedded YouTube videos, for example, and run even one of them, however brief, you will find the browser continues to pound away on your CPU even after FlashPlayer is finished. You literally have to reload the page to get it to stop. And no browser I have ever tested freezes on scripts half so bad as Opera, including on Windows. When it does, Opera can lock the entire X server.

Enter Google’s Chrome browser. Since I’m running Ubuntu, it’s pretty simple to download the Debian-based build. It’s faster than most other graphical browsers, far more stable with scripts, and plugins work much better. For example, after watching a Flash video the browser does not continue hogging the CPU. It manages to disengage the FlashPlayer until I need it again. Rendering is much quicker on everything, and fonts are pretty sharp. The drawback is the optional controls. Right now, you cannot turn off animated GIF images. I see dozens of requests for it, and I suppose they might actually implement it, since every other graphical browser does. Even if it required editing the configuration file manually, I’d be happy. On pages with too many moving GIFs, I simply use another browser, or have to turn off all images for that server. There are some extension modules you can download, such as FlashBlock and AdBlock, both of which save you from distractions, but the implementation is far from simple to use. AdBlock is pretty much all-or-nothing.

There are some other flaws, such as no option to treat cookies on the fly as session cookies. You either accept them or not. Also, I cannot get the Linux version to honor any sort of user CSS file, which is a basic requirement under the standards. Plenty of other fine-grained controls are missing, and some of the chatter on their developer lists indicates a poor attitude on some issues. Yet, in the balance of things, simply because what it does, it does better, I have made it my default browser. Give it a test drive.