nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

It turns out, even though its not advertised anywhere, the Chrome browser, based on Chromium, Google's great open source browser project, is available for download. It has been available for windows for a while now and work on Linux just fine via crossover or Wine.

Although I had to link a couple of libraries to get it working on my openSUSE machine, it was not a lot of work, and I have to say my first impressions of it are very good. It is a lot faster than Mozilla in both starting up and then the rendering of pages. It seemed to be about 2 to 3 times faster and tracking its CPU and memory usage showed it was less resource hungry than Firefox too. It is of course lacking a lot of features including plugin support (think flash), printing, gears support, etc.

The most noticeable feature was the visual cache u have of sites you visit most often. This creates a kind of dynamic favorite bookmarks page, which seems vey useful (to me at least.) It seems they are building various snapshots a day, making it a project that is clearly very active. If you'd like to get it running on openSUSE, follow these instructions once you've downloaded the file chromium.zip from the latest snapshot directory: ( http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/ )

cd /home/_user_

wget http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/_latest-snapshot_/chrome-linux.zip

Make sure you replace _latest-snapshot_ with the latest snapshot number from the page, and _user_ with your home directory

unzip chrome-linux.zip
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnss3.so /usr/lib/libnss3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libsmime3.so /usr/lib/libsmime3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libssl3.so /usr/lib/libssl3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplds4.so /usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplc4.so /usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnspr4.so /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d

You should now be able to run chrome via command line or by clicking on the binary. If you are on Ubuntu, there is a PPA where u can download the latest version: https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

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