Ubuntu 13.10 is hoping to ship with Chromium as the default web-browser in place of Mozilla Firefox. In a discussion on the subject at the current Ubuntu Developer Summit developers expressed broad support for the change, saying that they are "leaning towards" supporting such a switch.
Accessing daily builds of Google's Chrome browser in Ubuntu is a bit of a fuss compared to that on Windows and Mac. Users of those platforms can install the Chrome Canary builds - a sort of pseudo-daily build that offers the latest bleeding edge features, but running insulated from any other version of Chrome installed. In Ubuntu things are less clear cut.
Little has been heard of Ubuntu's multi-touch framework 'uTouch' of late - but it seems for good reason. The uTouch team have today demoed 'pixel perfect scrolling' in the open-source web-browser Chromium in Ubuntu, a feat made possible by taking advantage of Ubuntu's touch-friendly technology stack. The effort is part of the teams goal of 'adding multitouch and gesture support to major browsers on the Linux desktop.'
Reader David G mailed in to see we'd be interested in running a poll to see which 'brand' of Chrome Linux users prefer to use - either Google's Flash-plugin packing Google Chrome or the open-source, ready-in-the-repos Chromium. Given that our visitor stats don't distinguish between Chromium (both are grouped together as 'Chrome')I thought this would, indeed, be rather interesting to see. So, Sunday poll time: Do you use Chromium or Google Chrome? Let us know by voting in the poll inside.
It was only a few weeks ago that Firefox 4 was finally released after a development cycle lasting over a year. While Firefox 4 added features and speed, Mozilla believe more should be done to keep up with Google's increasingly popular browser, Chrome.
The folks over at Rovio, creators of the now famous Angry Birds, have unleashed an HTML5 version of the popular game that's designed to run in Chrome (or Chromium!) on any operating system.
Adding even more reason for switching to Chromium in Ubuntu, the latest Daily build of the browser has added a Unity Quicklist to the launcher icon, courtesy of Fabien Tassin.
Chrome/ium doesn't use Ubuntu's new Overlay Scrollbars which is a shame: thy're cute, slim and awesome to use. Whilst we can't enable overlay scrollbars themselves in Chrome/ium we can at least match the look, courtesy of reader Micha R who mailed in just how to do this...
The latest daily builds of Chromium come with a neat gift for Natty users - Unity Launcher progress bar and badge support. This is the second Unity-specific feature to land in Chromium. Ubuntu Application Menu support landed in the 'about:flags' staging area back in mid-April. Read on for install instructions.
OMG! Ubuntu! reader Cyrill sent us through a little mockup of what Ubuntu would look like with tabs inside the panel. He says "On my netbook's 10 inch screen, every single pixel is important. And as there is barely no global menu for Chromium (this changed apparently in Natty), i was wondering how it would look if tabs were using that free space."
The latest Daily Builds of open-source browser Chromium have added in experimental support for Ubuntu 11.04's new Global Menu via the about:flags staging area.
Today marks the release of Mozilla's long awaited Firefox 4. This new version of Firefox boasts that it's faster and simpler to use, as well as introducing a few new features, most notably, Firefox Sync. But is it good enough to compete with Google Chrome?