Chromium

[marcmagus]

Having heard that Chromium (the Open Source browser under the hood of Google Chrome uses threading to display separate tabs, I thought I'd install it and give it a whirl and see if it can keep up with my normal browsing habits.

Some initial thoughts:

• I use a two-level hierarchy for browsing, with separate windows for conceptual distinction and tabbed browsing within each to manage multiple things I might want to flip between. Chromium will let me have multiple windows, but new tabs opened via the command-line seem to always want to open in the first window rather than the window with focus.

• Out of the box I can't easily paste a URL into the browser to open it. There's an extension which does that, but it's a bit limited. It works, but its "open in new tab" feature (very cool idea) opens the new tab in the first browser window rather than the current one.

• vrome works to provide some vi-like keybindings, but is already missing some features I liked from vimperator. Notably, Shift-Insert seems to work with the chromium clipboard (I thought it did nothing) rather than the selection buffer, removing another way to easily open a URL I have in another program.

You might notice that so far the problem is related to my trying to quickly and easily get all the stuff I had open in my most recent Firefox session open in Chromium to see how they compare. Once I get that going I'll have a much better opportunity for comparison under load; it seems pretty nice and snappy right now, but it's not really a fair comparison yet.

More later...