I was quite impressed with Chromium. Chromium is the opensource work of developers from the source of Google Chrome. The latest version of chromium is now 5.* beta. Chromium implements the same set as Google Chrome and share the same extension as Google Chrome. Chromium can get the extension from Google Chrome official extension page and install it directly. Chromium project aims to create browser that safer, faster dan more stable than other browser. Moblin has its own browser, but it’s too limited for me. Standard browsers should cover flash, bookmark, download manager and few necessary extension or plugin like pdf or media player (mov, mp4, mp3, wav, avi etc). Then What should I do with my Moblin default browser?
My Main Browser
Previously I enjoyed using Firefox as my Moblin default browser. But later Chromium appears atractive to me. First impression is speed and liteness. To tell the truth, Chromium start almost just in time compare to few seconds of starting Firefox. Eventhough faster, few months a go never had any plan to leave Firefox so soon. I guess I’m just too attached on Firefox extension: adBlock Plus and Firebug. It was useless to have the fast browser but have also to eat so many banner ads I could not filtered. I have some personal website and web based application that I maintained  myself for my own needs, and so I need Firebug: another Firefox extension as debugging tool. So I reserve Chromium to try again later.

By year 2010, I check Chromium again. Version 4 is quite matured. Extension was already supported, I jut haven’t find the extension I need. The extension of Firefox keeps growing. Chromium has been faster than Firefox 3.5. But some sites benchmark that Firefox 3.6 has been already exceeded by Chromium. But at the same time, my firefox 3.6 often got crashed. It’s very annoying, it happens especially when we’re downloading something. Some plugin doesn’t work anymore, my fave one: Adobe pdf viewer plugin.

 

Chromium and Its Extensions

The alternatives are Opera and Chromium. Opera 10.10 is fine but Chromium 5 is proven faster. I’m glad when later I also found AdBlock and AdThwart in Chromium. Both of them are banner ads blocker. Actually I found adsweep before them. But it doesn’t work as good as adblock in Firefox, so I uninstalled adsweep. I finally found that adtwart is better than adblock. AdThwart is special extension for me. It said that it Blocks ads using the Firefox AdBlock Plus filter engine. For those who are familiar with the way AdBlock Plus of Firefox content filtering works, Adthwart is no different, the filter list and rule are all the same. So Adthwart is my first Chromium fixed extension.

Continue to explore Chromium extension, I found the other extension, it’s Firebug-lite. I don’t care with term “lite”. In a glance, seems to be just as I need. Another interesting extension is Auto-Translate. It’s linked to Google translator page. It’s easy, lite and instant translation result. Just hightlite the text we’d like to translate, the Auto-Translate will then pop-up the result as we configured in its option.

YouTube downloader is my another extenstension list. Sometimes I found an interesting content from YouTube and just want to keep it locally to replay later. Sometimes even works like converter. From YouTube video streaming content to mp3 for I want to extract just the sound of the video streaming content.

Conclusion

Well, I’m a Firefox fans. But lately the often crash is very annoying. But I even go back to Firefox 3.5 after unsatisfied with Firefox 3.6. The other little thing is window size. In Moblin, almost all application except Moblin Web Browser and Media Player, are not running in maximized size. If I want Firefox to be fullscreen is press F11 but when Firefox is in fullscreen mode the alt+tab function of Moblin is disabled, means I cannot move to ther other zones where I run other applications there.

Chromium is always running in maximized mode. It won’t disabled alt+tab function since it’s not fullscreen mode. It’s good for me. This is a little thing, yet because there’s no maximize or minimize button at the right-top corner application window, maximize application window is the same effort as change the size. We have to put cursor at the corner and drag it to the size we want it to be. Moblin is willing to simplify many things including maximize and minimize application window. I doubt this simplification will look more acceptable to the most of ordinary (ex) Window netbook users.

But Chromium solved it nicely. It’s quite matured now, most important thing is faster rendereing page. I shift Firefox to an alternative Moblin browser. The idea of sending pdf files to Google Docs just to be open and read, seems to be ridiculous for me. So if I work on intranet environment, and get the pdf files as web based application document result, I have to upload to Google Docs first before I could read. No chance of previewing pdf files in the browser with the existing library from Adobe or Foxit. With Chromium, the available way are: to download the pdf files first (then open with evince or Adobe reader) or upload it first to Google Docs.

It’s just a little thing. I am still able to download and open pdf files locally out of Chromium. I feel quite comfortable with Chromium. I declare it as my new Moblin Default Browser. Some say that Google will be watching you closely any address you visit with Google Chrome or Chromium. So be it, I will wait until Firefox run stable (again) and faster than Chromium to go set Firefox back as my default browser. Hi Mozilla, we’re still waiting for you.