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As I wrote in one of my previous articles, I have a netbook on which I installed Kubuntu. Everything works fine but Firefox seems a little too heavy for this kind of machines That’s why I decided to try another web browser lighter. So I tried Chromium, cross-platform browser developed by Google. Not to be confused with Chrome, another browser from Google. Chrome is from Chromium but it is a proprietary software, while Chromium is free. That’s why, this article is about Chromium, not Chrome.

Chromium exists for Windows, Linux and MacOS X. It is still under development, but it is becoming more stable. Anyway enough for regular use. It is very light, ideal for low-performance machines like netbooks. This lightness can also appreciate the very short time to display pages (even busy sites or flash that slow bigger software like Firefox).

In addition, Chromium has some interesting features:

• The possibility of opening a window limited: the addresses of pages that will be displayed are not included in the historic.
• An internal task manager to view the resources used for each process (tab, window, or an executable – eg Flash) with the opportunity to kill the process.
• A toolbox for developers (developer tools). Allows you to inspect the source code of a page, see the resources (scripts, images, etc..) called, as permitted by the Firebug extension of Firefox.

Note also that Chromium has a pretty and lively appearance. Personally, I find it completely corresponds to the small screens of netbooks because the space occupied by toolbars, menu bars, etc.. is minimized. In my case I have adopted it. And adaptation has not been difficult since it imports directly all your Firefox bookmarks.

http://code.google.com/chromium/

http://dev.chromium.org/

http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/chromium-browser (install process for (K)ubuntu, in french)

Tags: Chrome, Chromium, Google, libre, Linux, Mac OS, netbooks, Windows

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 20:51 and is filed under Experiments . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.