Any Google Chrome/Chromium or Opera experiences/reviews?

[Christopher Browne]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Giles Orr <gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 1 July 2010 18:18,  <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 01, 2010 at 12:40:01PM -0400, Myles Braithwaite wrote
>>> I am a big fan of Google Chrome, but it will have the same problems
>>> that you have with Firefox.
>>
>> [i3][root][~] emerge -pv www-client/chromium
>> [...snippage...]
>> Total: 9 packages (9 new), Size of downloads: 165,644 kB
>>
>> [i3][root][~] emerge -pv opera
>> [...snippage...]
>> Total: 4 packages (4 new), Size of downloads: 169,210 kB
>>
>>  And to think that I was whining about Firefox.  Sigh.  If I had a
>> million dollars, and could hire a team of programmers, I'd launch a fork
>> of Firefox already.
>
> Given the origin of your complaints, you might be interested in uzbl
> (http://www.uzbl.org/).  I love the idea: it's a web browser that
> follows the Unix philosophy, ie. each program should be small and do
> one thing really well.  No kitchen sinks, and it can be put in a
> pipeline.  Extra functionality (ie. extraneous things like
> printing(!)) are handled by optional plug-ins or pipelines.  As I say,
> I love the *idea*, but in practical terms I'm not sure it's ready for
> most of us to use day-to-day yet - not if flash is a concern.  I used
> it some for web surfing for a day or two, but I don't know if I got to
> the flash sites to test.  It seems to be evolving rapidly and is
> definitely worth a look.

It's interesting; I'm very much with you in loving the idea, but
haven't found it quite practical yet.  There are neat ideas, including
 - integration with Emacs <http://github.com/haxney/ezbl>
 - use your own favorite script to manage bookmarks

On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be usable without "cooking your
own toolchain" around it, notably including:
 - coping with how you want to cope with bookmarks
 - forms seem to be nontrivial somehow
 - it's nice that uzbl, like vi and emacs, allows customizing
keybindings; it's not so nice that
   you seem to need to do so in order to get it working.

While it certainly addresses Walter's issues (e.g. - no need for it to
integrate in SQLite for managing bookmarks, because it leave bookmark
management as something to be managed separately altogether[1]), it's
not at all obvious how it copes with the "Flash issue."

Flash is an issue where I'm not notably comfortable with any of the
answers.  The Apple criticisms
<http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/> seem to be pretty
valid.  (Albeit with the lurking elephant that the essay is almost
equally valid if you substitute "Apple" for "Adobe" and "IOS" for
"Flash.")  People have discomfort about various of these related
technologies, such as Air, Silverlight, Moonlight, and while I decline
to engage in the hysterical twittering about "Mono is a Microsoft
PLOT!!!", I'm fine with having "a level of discomfort" about them all.

I'm curious as to what happens if you build up a reasonably complete
toolchain around uzbl.  Will it bloat in similar ways to FireFox (and,
for that matter, Chrome) if you open a dozen web pages at once?

It's possible that by keeping the infrastructure for bookmarks and
such out of it, the footprint can stay rather smaller.

On the other hand, if what's really "eating your lunch" is the memory
footprint induced by the JavaScript run by all the AJAX-like
applications, then the would-be savings may be a mirage.

It would be unfortunate to go to the effort of building toolchains
around uzbl if it left the *big* problems unsolved.
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