I have been Firefox fan for many years, in fact, I was a Mozilla and Netscape fan before that. I’ve tried many different browsers, but nothing, to me ever came close to what Firefox could offer. Although many people like Firefox for all of the available add-on’s, I’m more of a simple user…there have been a few small addon’s I’d adopted over the years, but nothing I couldn’t live without, and honestly I’d forget about them most of the time. I simply liked Firefox because it was an excellent browser that was available on all of the platforms I used and it just worked – plain and simple.

When Google first announced Chrome for Windows, I was pretty skeptical. In fact, I hated the initial build that I installed. However, I warmed up to it quickly and it has become my browser of choice on my Windows boxes, while continuing to use Firefox on my Linux boxes.

I recently found out about the PPA repositories for Ubuntu and since then I’ve been doing as much browsing as possible on my Ubuntu laptop with Chromium (the open source browser behind “Chrome”). These are all daily builds, and can be unstable, and may change from day to day. As of right now, there are still some things that simply do not work as expected (such as plugins and add-ons) but I kinda like browsing the web w/o Flash every once in a while

If you would like to experience the awesomeness of this light-weight Webkit browser follow the instructions below.

Bear in mind that there are no x86_64 builds as of yet, so if you are running 64-bit Ubuntu as I am, you must have the ia32-libs installed.

First you’ll need to add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:


deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu [version] main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu [version] main


Where [version] equals the version of Ubuntu you are on in it’s “codename” format, so you can choose between:

• Hardy (8.04)
• Intrepid (8.10)
• Jaunty (9.04)
• Karmic (9.10)

After adding the repositories to your sources.list you’ll want to add GPG key for the repo to your apt keyring by executing the following command in a Terminal window:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 4E5E17B5

Finally simply run sudo apt-get update to update your sources. Bear in mind for Chromium to work, you must have the package msttcorefonts installed or no text will render, so before installing Chromium, install the MS Core fonts by executing sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts once they are downloaded and installed, you can install Chromium with sudo apt-get install chromium-browser.

Now you can Chromium in all it’s glory. Be sure to see this page for more information. Also, be sure to check out the Chromium Project page in Launchpad as well as the official web-site of the Chromium project.

Thanks to all of the hard work that have made this browser, and this repository possible.

See Part II for info on plug-ins.

Google has released the very first beta of their new web browser, Google Chrome. Chrome is a browser that, for now at least, is focused on offering a full browsing experience within a minimalistic user interface. To skip past the P.R. phrasing, Google Chrome is designed to be simple to use without sacrificing any of the features required for daily web browsing.

To get a little more in depth, Google Chrome uses the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser, named Webkit. In recent history, the developers of Webkit have made great strides in creating what is, as of today, the fastest browser engine in terms of rendering speed. Google Chrome, currently version 0.2.149.27, seems to use a slightly older build of Webkit (version 525.13, to be precise), however, so some of the recent Webkit development gains will not have made it into the first release of the browser.

Other features of Chrome include a dynamic tab system which allows you to drag and drop tabs inside and outside of the browser window, an “incognito mode” in which the sites you visit are not added to your browsing history, and a feature similar to Opera’s Speed Dial, in which you are presented with your nine most visited websites, in thumbnail form, when opening a new tab.

If you wish to give Google Chrome a try, click the download link below. It’s an early beta, though, so don’t expect it to be perfect.

Link: Google Chrome
Download: Google Chrome 0.2.149.27
Screenshot: View