Scaine.net

It was September last year when I last properly tried Chromium in Ubuntu.  Back then, there was no bookmark sync, extensions were a glint in the dev’s eyes and GTK theme support was a new feature.

I didn’t particularly elaborate in that article about why I didn’t make the switch back then.  In fact, I open the article claiming that the experience was a mixed bag, then pretty much rave about it!  I must have been tired that day…

Then

The primary reason I didn’t switch was that I was hooked on Firefox extensions.  Well, four anyway – SyncPlaces, Flashblock, AdBlock and FEBE.

• Syncplaces will sync bookmarks using any FTP, NFS or Samba share.
• Flackblock does what it says on the tin – it replaces Flash elements on a web page with a click-able placeholder.
• AdBlock Plus needs no introduction.  As far as I know, the best advert blocker for any browser.   Go on, prove me wrong!
• FEBE is a backup and restore tool.

Now

Flash forward, 9 months later : present day.  3 of these extensions now exist on Chromium, kind of.  Here they are :

• Chromium Sync.  Technically, not an extension : this is now built into Chromium itself and all you need is a Google account.  Your bookmarks, extensions, preferences, auto fill and themes can be synced across any PC you use Chromium.  Syncplaces was, by comparison, pretty horrific to set up (and needed to be downloaded first), but it did mitigate any privacy concerns you might have about uploading your data to Google.  Personally, I use so many Google products day to day that uploading my bookmarks wasn’t a concern.  Your mileage may vary.

• Flashblock for Chromium shares its name with its Firefox compatriot, but they’re by different authors.  There may be trouble ahead!
• Similar story for AdBlock for Chromium.  Well, at least it’s not called “Adblock Plus”!  This has similar functionality to its Firefox big brother, allowing multiple subscriptions to keep the adblock relevant, and it can also be turned on/off for specific sites.  It does not, however, sport the incredible per-element blocking that made the original so powerful.

So, what’s missing?  Well, FEBE, obviously.  I still can’t find an extension which will “snapshot” my Chromium install and perfectly restore it on another machine.  My Firefox browsing history goes back about 2 years, across 4 different operating systems thanks to FEBE.  However, given that Chromium Sync started off as just Bookmarks before expanding into Themes, and just recently Extensions, I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before we see History too.

Google Sync puts all your data into a special directory on Google Docs, so I imagine that anything (within reason) could be stored there in future.

We Fear Change

So did I make the switch?  Incredibly, given my history and love of Firefox : “Yep”.  In February, I bought my Google Nexus One phone and on that day, I suspect that I may just have sold my soul to Google.  In April, Froyo fever started pitching and in preparation, I started dabbling with Chromium again.  Finally, after May’s Google I/O conference when Froyo was announced, one feature in particular swayed me towards moving to Chromium whole scale – the cloud sync feature.  This is where you buy music on Amazon (or Google themselves this Christmas, perhaps) and you simply send your purchase to your phone, right from within the web page.  Or perhaps you’re on Google Maps getting directions, and those directions are sent as Navigate options to your phone.  Very sweet.  But initially at least, I think it requires Chromium.

Pros

• Start up hasn’t changed in 9 months – it’s still blindingly fast.
• The Javascript engine is famously fast and sites like this will prove that very effectively.  Perhaps Firefox 4 will close the gap here though.
• Extensions install instantly.  They un-install just as fast.  Their options pages are web pages, which makes for a very integrated, natural feeling.
• Chomium Sync, despite being Google-only, will rock your world if you use Chromium on more than one PC.
• The “Awesome Bar” doubles as a URL entry location and a search bar in one.  I think this used to be offered in Firefox, then reverted.  The latest rumours I’ve heard suggest that it’s heading back to one-bar for Firefox 4.
• Did I mention that start up?

Cons

• In order to take advantage of the speed of development, I’m using the daily build PPA (details below).  This means two things.  One, you’ll be prompted to update every day by your package manager.  Two, many banking websites won’t entertain you.  Here in the UK, I have one account at the RBS and they block beta builds.  Interesting actually – even a user-agent switcher doesn’t fool their website, so they must be fingerprinting another way somehow.
• In the short term, a few things will have moved around and will take getting used to.  Nothing major, but here’s an example : right clicking on a link in Firefox, “Open in New Tab” is the third option down, but in Chromium it’s the top option.  There’s a few little gotchas like this.
• Bookmark organisation isn’t quite as slick as Firefox yet.  You can’t grab tabs and create shortcuts from them – you must still use the favicon logo to the left of the URL.  If, like me, you keep multiple folders on the toolbar, you’ll find that you  can’t re-order the bookmarks inside these folder using drag-and-drop.  You have to right-click, open the organiser and do it there.  Finally, I’m not convinced by “Other Bookmarks”.  It gets cluttered very quickly and takes up valuable toolbar space if you don’t use it.
• Downloads are pretty intrusive, with a big bar appearing at the bottom of the browser whenever anything comes down the line.  You have to manually close it after each download.  I couldn’t find a way, extension or otherwise, of changing this.

Install

I use the daily builds (https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa), so in order to install, just pop these commands into a terminal

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

After a bit of research, spurred on by this OMG Ubuntu! article, I bit the bullet and installed Blogilo. Before doing so, I tried BloGTK and Gnome Blog. The former had potential, but no WYSIWYG editor, so you had to know your HTML. I don’t. The latter was incredibly basic and doesn’t even download previous entries for reference or editing. It’s more like a micro-blogging client.

So, KDElibs installed, Blogilo installed and… nothing. I ran it in a terminal, and got some horrific output. It took a bit of Googling, but eventually, I found this post, whose comments reveal that LibQT4-SQL-SQLite must be installed. Total mystery why this isn’t a dependency. Everything else required certainly was.

So, first impressions then? I’m typing this in Blogilo now after a simple “Add Blog” wizard downloaded my meagre previous entries. I tried to make a small edit to one of those, but discovered that although the entry came down and was editable, it didn’t know what tags were applied to the post. I duly ticked the relevant tags and hit the “submit” button. The progress started… and never stopped. But it did, it seems, upload. It put my first paragraph into a bullet list, somewhat unexpectedley, but otherwise it’s fine.

But then some more serious issues arise. I’ve just tried uploading a screenshot of Blogilo in action (after using the awesome Shutter to grab the window). While gnome apps generally let me copy/paste the image from Shutter into the relevant window, in Blogilo the “paste” option remains resolutely greyed out. Perhaps some missing KDE libs, or just a total lack of communication between gnome and KDE. I’m not sure.

Worse, when I manually add the image using the add image button, it will only add at full size. If I add it at say 640×480, I generate a KIO slave error. More missing KDE dependencies, perhaps.

Finally, perhaps I’m missing it, but there’s no “Check Spelling” button. There is, however, an option to enable spell checking as you type, which I generally dislike as it generates flashing red underlines for every word as you type until it recognises what you’re actually doing. It also highlights all the stuff in the post you don’t care about because they’re product names.

I’m not giving up on Blogilo, but I doubt I’ll use it much. Perhaps if media uploading worked, I could forgive the various other quirks, but for the moment, it remains easier to type directly into the web interface of WordPress, at least for me.

Just a quick list of top-quality Ubuntu software that you may or may not have heard about.  In no particular order.  Many are installable from the repository, while others might require a little google/search for their PPA (I’ve kicked you off with a link for each).  This post revolves around Ubuntu 10.04 – the Lucid Lynx.

1. Handbrake.  This allows you to rip your DVDs into MP4 format for viewing on any H264 compatible device, such as Sony PSP or Android phone.  The interface is very slick and easy and it will take advantage of multiple cores to speed up the process.

2.  Remmina.  This is an RDP and VNC client.  You can use it to connect to Windows terminal services (RDP) or Ubuntu (VNC) remote desktops.  It also supports Avahi which is like a local-network autodiscovery of these services.  It can also use SSH if required.  What really makes this stand out though is the beautiful interface for launching these sessions.

3. Deluge.  A superb alternative to Transmission, this superlative client can also run in a client/server mode which is supremely easy to set up.  Simply run Deluge on the server in “server” mode, then run the same package on your laptop in “client” mode, connecting to the server.  Thereafter, anything you kick off on your laptop will actually start downloading on your server.  Close your laptop and everything just keeps ticking over on your server.  Superb functionality and beautifully realised.

4. jBrout.  If you have a lot of photos and struggle to categorise them, this is the software for you.  The idea is that you create tags for your collection (people, place names, things, etc) and then you drag those tags onto the pictures.  What stands this software out from the rest is that while many other programs will then create a database to store these tags in (which you’ll lose if you re-install, sit at another PC and so on), jBrout will actually edit the photo, adding the tags into the Exif details of that photo.   Never lose your hard work again!  I’ve written more about jBrout in an earlier post.

5. Phatch.  The title is meant to be an amalgam of “Photo” and “Batch”.  Another cracking interface makes it very easy to take a folder (or multiple folders) full of pictures and apply various transformations to them.  The main use I found for this is to take ALL your photos and rename them into a folder structure which is dictated by the time you took the photo.  This way, you can see, visually, when each photo was taken.  Combined with jBrout, you’ll never struggle to find another photo again.