I won’t get into the concerns about whether google chrome is proper free software right now, mostly because I’ve started a discussion on it with the gnu/linux-libre group, which is a coalition of free distro developers where we collaborate and discuss these things together – and I don’t want to push anything until that conversation is done. Instead, here’s my review of the google-chrome browser’s official GNU/Linux beta release as I found it in my testing – with a mostly technical focus.
This also means there won’t be a kongoni port just yet – whether there will be one depends on the outcome of the aforementioned discussions.
I received a mail from google last night (which I’d requested) to inform me that the Linux beta for google-chrome is now officially available, followed the link and got greeted by a nice XKCD-esque comic about it. Followed another link and got the download page with the ugly EULA. Oh well. Packages were available for a few major distros – four in all, 32/64 bit RPM’s and 32/64 bit debs.
Kongoni can convert either to a usable format, and I’d previously done some chromium testing using the debs, but I opted for the RPM’s here. Doubt this makes much difference but just for interest. I grabbed the 64-bit one, ran rpm2tgz on it, and installed it. It created a /etc/cron.daily script which is meant to install the regular updates, currently of course, this won’t work, but if I end up supporting it, the kongoni version can easily enough replace it with it’s own. The RPM version’s script seems to use yum, presumably the deb version will use apt.
That out of the way, the next clencher was that it missed some libraries from mozilla-nss, which was odd since I have it installed. Double-check, the library names weren’t the same – close but it wanted additonal 1d and 0d extensions, a couple of symlinks sorted that out.
It came up, seemed to work – but wouldn’t render anything, checked the console output – lots of shm messages. Okay, I know that one from earlier experiments, set /dev/shm to world-writeable and retried. It imported my firefox settings, including saved passwords and bookmarks wonderfully – and suddenly, it works sweetly.
Okay, start playing… it’s fast, very fast. Faster than I remember from testing on windows… much faster. It’s slick, easy to use and just flows around the net. Played a bit with extensions – installing one for facebook and one for twitter – both worked instantly, without requiring a restart, and ran very nicely (though the buttons-next-to-the-address-bar choice may not be their best decision, that could get very cluttered fast for people with lots of extensions). Some googling around failed to find an addblocking extension just yet or anything for laconi.ca but I may just have not looked hard enough.
Still, I rather like it, it’s bleeding fast, beautifully rendered.. just about perfect in fact. The slight difficulties installing is probably because I didn’t built a proper kongoni port, and thus had to do manual effort to sort things out when converting a package built for another distro. All in all, I think google and their volunteer developers on chromium did and awesome job with the port. Well done, when my only gripe is a minor one of aesthetics – that says something.
