More Chromium

[marcmagus]

• Once it's up and running, Chromium seems able to handle my c. 50 simultaneous tabs comparably to Firefox in terms of overall system performance, or at least not noticeably worse.

• Restarting with that many tabs is also comparable. I was hoping for an improvement.

• Actual browsing of the sort of thing I generally browse (which is mostly a lot of text with images) feels noticeably slicker. In particular, in Firefox I get a very noticeable delay when I change tabs or especially windows. In Chromium I can jump around between windows with a delay that is within reason (comparable to typing speed).

• Yesterday in Firefox I found the scribd webapp for the Prop 8 Ruling unusably slow. Here in Chromium today it's a bit pokey, but quite usable. I sincerely doubt it's a difference between yesterday and today.

• In-browser video seems to be inconsistent, perhaps depending on the underlying technology. YouTube videos actually seem slightly improved. Other sources (which I have no idea how different they are under the hood) seem choppier than I'm used to. Not sure what to make of this one.

• I haven't yet had the problem where Flash applications (such as streaming videos) have the audio get completely screwed up and I have to quit the browser to correct the problem. This may just be luck, though.

• I've tried two programs which are supposed to provide a similar experience to vimperator in Chromium: vrome and vimium. Both offer a really inconsistent user experience (not always working, frustratingly), and a strict subset of the features I want. It seems part of this may well be due to limitations of the Chromium extension architecture, which is, well, frustrating. I'd like more of an :ex-style interface, and the ability to hide the address-bar like Vimperator offers. Very annoyingly, both extensions don't seem to use keypresses chorded with Control correctly, and instead pass them through to the browser.