Google Chrome on Linux

It’s a New Year, a new decade even.  I thought it was time to try out some news apps.

I’m an avid Opera user, I’ve been using it solid for 6 months for both email and web browsing.  One of the amazing things that I have found with Opera is the speed of rendering pages, especially 9.10, but it’s load time leaves a fair amount to be desired.  The mail handling features however, they are pretty good and handle in a way that’s a little bit like Googlemail.

So everyone had been raving about Google Chrome, well the Windows lot have been anyway.   They’ve also been shouting a fair amount about Safari too although most of this has been abuse rather than actual “wow” factor.  On my lovely Mint Linux 8 box, I fired up Opera, pointed to Google and typed Chrome and then quickly landed on the install page.

I grabbed the 32bit Debian version and installed.  Upon firing up Chrome asked if it was allowed to be the centre of attention, a la Default Browser and I said yes.  I also agreed to it sending all my vitals back to Google under the guise of anonymous usage statistics that I dare say includes my bank details, IP address and passport information.

Google Chrome is plain to look at, it rather looks like Safari if I’m honest (calm down fan-boys).  What caught me is page loading speed, quickly followed by the extensions which are already available for a beta.  In went Adblock, in went Google Mail checker (which is pants), it already had Flash from the OS but it handles Youporn with a lot less pain than Opera, along with The Sun website which is seriously flash heavy.

One thing it suffers with is not smooth scrolling webpages, it’s kind of jittery for that all though there is an extension that supposedly fixes it.  I’ll carry on my testing and post the results later.  Now, I better get me a new email client…

—————————- 09/01/10 ——————————–

I’ve driven Chrome for Linux for approximately 24 hrs, not impressed.  Sorry Google, you’re good, but not that good.  I can’t render pages such as The Sun.com properly without the browser hanging, as well as Kontraband.  The crappy scroll drives me insane and it isn’t fixed with extensions.  This is currently a Google fail.  Back to Opera.