Ubuntucat

Introduction
Add key for Chromium daily build repositories
Add Chromium daily build repositories
Install Chromium
Enable plugins
Use system GTK theme
First 4 steps with one terminal command

Introduction

Chromium is still in testing. It has not been officially released, so please do not expect it to run well. In the minimal use I've made of it, it appears to run okay, but daily updates could just break it at any moment.

So please be prepared to have a backup browser ready to use (like Firefox) and do not do anything critical in Chromium at this time (e.g., something you'd be really sad about if you were in the middle of doing it and your browser randomly crashed).

Click on any of the screenshots below in order to see a larger image.

Add key for Chromium daily build repositories

First, add the GPG key for the Chromium daily build repos.

Visit the Chromium daily builds section of Launchpad.

Copy the line of code to add the key.

Open up a terminal.

Paste in the code.

Add Chromium daily build repositories

Now we need to add the actual repositories.

Go back to the PPA page, select your version of Ubuntu, and then copy the first line of text.

Go to System > Administration > Software Sources and enter your password when prompted.

Under Third-Party Software click Add. In APT line: paste in the line, and then click Add Source.

Do the same thing for the second line.

When prompted to reload the the repositories information, do so and wait.

Install Chromium

Now that we have the daily builds repositories enabled, we can actually install Chromium.

Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager and search for chromium

Mark chromium-browser for installation and then confirm the Mark.

Click Apply and then confirm again by clicking the second Apply when prompted.

Wait for Chromium to finish installing.

Quit Synaptic and quit Firefox.

Enable plugins

Even though Chromium is installed and ready to use now, it doesn't come with the browser plugins enabled (no YouTube... no anything involving Flash).

If you want to enable plugins, go ahead and launch Chrome.

Copy the little phrase --enable-plugins

Right-click the Applications menu and select Edit Menus

Then, under Applications > Internet, double-click Chromium Web Browser and under Command, paste --enable-plugins right after chromium-browser and right before %U, so the whole command will read

Use system GTK theme

By default, Chromium will have the same blue border that Chrome has in Windows.

If you want to blend it in with your GTK theme, click on the wrench and select Options

Then, under Personal Stuff, select Set to GTK+ theme

That's it. You're ready to go now and use Chromium!

First 4 steps with one terminal command

If you've never added the daily builds repositories and if you're using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), you can do all the first four steps (sans getting Chromium to use your GTK theme) by just pasting this one command into the terminal:

When I read the features in the new Safari 4 beta, I got really excited. My wife uses Safari on her Mac because when she first started using OS X, Firefox and Camino weren’t very stable (the user profiles kept getting corrupt). Now Firefox is much better, and she uses it at work for the web developer extension, but she still uses Safari at home.

Well, I kind of twisted her arm to give Safari 4 beta a try. A lot of the new features sound exciting. It has a tab bar on top to save vertical space (just like Google Chrome). It has a “speed dial” page of your most frequently visited websites (just like Opera and Chrome). Its speed dial is very slick-looking, though (reminiscent of Exposé or the album browser in iTunes).

It still has two major shortcomings, though.

• Although there is an entry in History for restoring the tabs from last session, there is no setting to have the tabs from last session automatically get restored every time you start the browser.
• Typing phrases in the address bar doesn’t search for them. Instead, you still get a page saying the URL isn’t found, and then a prompt to search for the phrase. Why not just search instead of adding that extra step? Pretty much every major browser does this (Firefox, Opera, Camino, Chrome). Why not Safari?

Well, I’m glad Apple has put in at least a little more effort into making Safari a better browser. Maybe Safari 5 will actually bring some innovative features instead of just playing catch-up.

The other day I was talking with a Windows-using friend. She’s using an old laptop of ours, as her newer laptop is having various hardware and software issues. I noticed she was using Chrome, and I asked her how she liked it. She liked it for the most part, except she didn’t like how Google wouldn’t let her organize her own bookmarks. She said she can’t imagine it would be that difficult. I told her it was probably quite the opposite. Google’s “smart” bookmarking in Chrome (with the most frequently visited and most recently visited sites showing up in the Opera-like speed dial page) is probably more difficult to implement (from a programming perspective) than the more traditional bookmark style (organize it yourself).

She then described to me how she organizes her bookmarks, and I was fascinated by her way of thinking about sites. She organizes them based on action (see, shop, read, share, etc.). I organize mine in kind of a strange way too. My bookmarks I organize by how often I view them. So I have a folder full of “weekly” bookmarks and a folder full of “daily” bookmarks. Inside the daily ones, I have my Bloglines reader, which contains all the sites I would ordinarily bookmark except that they have RSS feeds, so I’d prefer Bloglines to keep me informed of when they update instead. So every day, I open all the sites in my daily folder in tabs, and every week I open my weekly bookmarks in tabs. And any non-bookmarked site I visit I just use Google or Firefox’s own “smart” address bar to find.

How do you all (my small set of loyal readers—thanks for visiting!) organize your bookmarks? Or do you bother organizing them at all? Or do you even have bookmarks?

I’ve been a Ubuntu Forums member for well over three years now. I am also now a moderator of the forums. For a while now, I think my wife has considered me a bit of a weirdo, as I’m constantly writing support to and getting support from all these people I’ve never met and probably will never meet in person.

But recently she’s joined up an online forum herself and realized that, yes, if you have a relatively obscure interest and not many people share that interest with you in “real life” (i.e., among your in-person friends and acquaintances), then online communities are a good place to get support and information.

No one close to me uses Ubuntu as her primary operating system. I’m surrounded by Mac and Windows users. So if I have a question about Ubuntu, where do I go? Online. It makes only logical sense.

It also means that all the naysayers who think “Oh, no! What if Ubuntu becomes really popular and everyone starts using it? The online forums will overload! There will be too many support requests for the forums to handle” are ignoring the fact that for many people online forums are a fallback. If “everyone” started using Ubuntu, most people wouldn’t go to a forum to get support with technical issues. They’d go to their tech-savvy family member or friend, just as they do now with Mac and Windows. It’s only the tech-savvy family member or friend who will have to resort to forums when she is unable to figure out the problem herself.

I realize there exist people who generally prefer online communication to in-person contact (sometimes I do, depending on the context), but for many folks, online connections are just fillers for a void in in-person connection.

When Google Chrome hit the scene a little while ago, I was excited. Scott McCloud’s online comic book (although confusing at times) was a good sell on Chrome’s features, and I particularly liked the way it handles each tab as a separate process.

Immediately, on my computer at work, I installed Chrome and started using it as my default browser. The speed was amazing. In terms of rendering pages, it seemed to be as fast as Opera, and the interface responsiveness made it seem even faster. I also dug how Chrome’s version of the “speed dial” was dynamic based on the pages you’ve visited (in Opera’s you have to set the speed dial pages manually).

But, alas, Chrome (like Opera) has annoying tab behavior. It opens new tabs next to the current tab. That doesn’t work well with how I browse. I like to open links in new tabs at the end of the row so that I can get to them eventually. I don’t like to switch to them right away after closing the current tab. I tried to put up with it for a while, but Firefox is the browser that works with my style. Maybe someone will come up with a preference hack for Chrome that will change the tab behavior. Until then, I’ll remain a Firefox user.