Browsers, browsers.

I've been using Firefox as my main browser for the last 6 months, but I recently decided to try out Chrome again as my desktop Firefox was getting a bit slow and buggy. (I was running the Aurora build, which might have something to do with it.) I just thought it would be a good idea to try out chrome as my main browser.

First thing I noticed was that the android Chrome browser was strangely slow, it had these one second freezes every now and then. I was annoying, but not a big problem. The desktop version seemed quite fast, but not as fast as I remembered.

Syncing worked well, about the same as in Firefox. However, the bookmarks are more intuitive in the Firefox mobile version than the Chrome mobile.

But at this point I started to run into some trouble. As you may be aware, Adobe stopped developing Flash for Linux, so the linux flash plugin is fairly old. It's also quite buggy. For instance on my dualhead setup if you fullscreen the Youtube Flash player in Chrome the browser remains in fullscreen and you can't get out unless you close the browser and start it again. (F11 doesn't work) I don't know if this is a flash bug, but it doesn't hapen in the HTML player.

After a while I decided that the flash player is more trouble than it's worth so I wanted to remove it. This is of course not possible in chrome, since it's built in, but I installed Chromium. As a bonus Chromium was considerably faster as well. Now however the trouble began.

I had noticed before that Google had removed all YouTube downloaders from the Chrome extension page. This is one of the reasons you don't want to have the same people making your browser as the big services you are using on the web. This wasn't a huge problem for me, since if I ever needed to save stuff from Youtube, I could just start Firefox and do it there. Now I noticed that there was another big problem with Chrome/Chromium. You can't really use the HTML5 player on Youtube. Even though Chrome/Chromium can play all content through the HTML5 player, it doesn't allow to do that. There is no extension that can force the HTML5 player even though you have enabled it. Any video that has commercials can only be played through the Flash player. This is particularly strange since adblock is allowed, and it removes all ads from Youtube, even in the Flash player.

So after only about 3-4 weeks of testing I switched back to Firefox. I enabled gstreamer in about:config, and now it plays h.264 videos as well. It's not that Youtube is so very important to me, but Chrom(e/ium) is just not as good, all things considered. And Chrome it's starting to get that Microsoft like stink where you have to fight silly artificial restrictions to get it to work like you want. I realise that there is a lot of stuff in Firefox that doesn't work properly, but there it's just a matter of not having written the code to support it yet.