What browser do you use?

[vinnywright]

I have a few friends who use the SR Iron on Windows XP. We got to talking about browsers and this "really old guy" in the room, from the 70s I think. He cough up some spider webs and then in a creepy mummified voice said, "Back in my day we used Lynx with Gopher search engine." There was a silence while he stroked his gray neck beard. We just glared at him until he sank back into his coffin.

hay hay now young-un ...... I had fun in the 70s , you should respect your elders .

lynx ,,,,,,,,,,you mean this





VINNY

[oshunluvr]

Careful when you talk like that around here Simon. There's one or two of those "really old" guys lurking, and we have nothing to lose!

LOL!

[SteveRiley]

Rekonq -- because I like KDE integration.

Chromium -- because Rekonq will puke on some sites (it's a QtWebKit problem) and because it's the only way to keep a modern Flash binary installed. The archived one from Adobe is really old now.

[dequire]

Rekonq -- because I like KDE integration.

Chromium -- because Rekonq will puke on some sites (it's a QtWebKit problem) and because it's the only way to keep a modern Flash binary installed. The archived one from Adobe is really old now.

Just curious, because I do not have it installed right now, but how is SteamOS handling the Flash issue? All Steam game pages have Flash videos embedded in them.

Semi related - Is it really a smart move for Kubuntu to ship Firefox by default for 14.04 considering A) It's not a KDE app, and B) It uses old Flash and 14.04 is a LTS...

It appears that Ubuntu ships Firefox by default as well...Wouldn't Chromium make more sense? Especially for Kubuntu, as now the GTK+ dependency has been (thankfully) removed.

[SteveRiley]

Just curious, because I do not have it installed right now, but how is SteamOS handling the Flash issue? All Steam game pages have Flash videos embedded in them.

I dunno. Google might, though

Semi related - Is it really a smart move for Kubuntu to ship Firefox by default for 14.04 considering A) It's not a KDE app, and B) It uses old Flash and 14.04 is a LTS...

There was chatter about this on kubuntu-devel a while back. IIRC, ScottK has a number of reservations about Chrom(e)ium, mostly having to do with security and lack of timely updates into the Ubuntu repositories. Version 33 was branched in January and most recently updated this week; meanwhile, the repositories still have version 32:

steve@t520:~$ [B]apt-cache policy chromium-browser[/B]
chromium-browser:
  Installed: 32.0.1700.107-0ubuntu0.13.10.1~20140204.972.1
  Candidate: 32.0.1700.107-0ubuntu0.13.10.1~20140204.972.1
  Version table:
 *** 32.0.1700.107-0ubuntu0.13.10.1~20140204.972.1 0
        500 http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu/ saucy-updates/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ saucy-security/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     29.0.1547.65-0ubuntu2 0
        500 http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu/ saucy/universe amd64 Packages

[dequire]

So as a member of Kubuntu Developers, couldn't Scott just simply file a bug report w/ Ubuntu Packaging to update Chromium, esp. if it was considered to be the default in Kubuntu? I know there was a Chromium PPA in the past, but IIRC that has since been neglected.

I really do <3 Firefox, even better than Chrome / Chromium. Esp. appearance-wise in Kubuntu once the Blue Shell PPA is enabled. However, I have a number of reservations in using Firefox as the default in a LTS...a few off the top -

(1) Flash (obviously...)
(2) Horrible un-readable pages in Firefox if using a dark theme - even the dark themes included by KDE by default! (See my bug report here). This is a serious user-experience issue. The bug report has picture examples and a possible fix...
(3) It is, AFAIK, the only GTK+ app included by default for Kubuntu and provides an inconsistent / bad user experience with GTK+ file dialogues and lack of knowledge of any default KDE applications w/o serious tweaking with stock repo Firefox

Just my 2 proverbial cents.

[dequire]

Even Martin Gräßlin acknowledges the horri-bad experience using stock FF in KDE...

Firefox KDE integration in Debian Testing

[dequire]

I was a die hard Opera fan, but then they stopped supporting Linux.

Apparently not.

[SteveRiley]

Apparently not.

That's the old version 12, with Opera's WebKit rendering engine. The current version with the Blink engine, for Windows and Mac only, is now 20.

[SteveRiley]

I found some semi-official PPAs for newer versions of Chromium. Currently:

* chromium-browser-beta-daily has version 34 for Saucy and Trusty
* chromium-browser-dev-daily has version 35 for Saucy and Trusty

These are maintained by Chad Miller, a Canonical employee.

Just now, I added the PPA for version 35 -- this is the one with the new Aura toolkit. It's still compiled to require Gtk+ and GNOME schtuff:

steve@t520:~$ [B]apt-cache depends chromium-browser=35.0.1870.2-0~devtesting031101~s |egrep 'gtk|glib|gnome'[/B]
  Depends: libglib2.0-0
  Depends: libgnome-keyring0
  Depends: libgtk2.0-0

Nevertheless, it sure looks better -- fonts are noticeably crisper.

[SteveRiley]

Just now, I added the PPA for version 35 -- this is the one with the new Aura toolkit.

Buuuuut something is seriously wonky -- it won't save any settings or configuration data. I even deleted ~/.config/chromium and started over. The browser writes nothing there. Each time I launch it, the default settings are restored. Weird...

[Simon]

Careful when you talk like that around here Simon. There's one or two of those "really old" guys lurking, and we have nothing to lose!

LOL!

Sorry about that "old guys" but here on campus we have a friend in the IT division who for lack of a better term is a professional student. Keith is a 64 year old professional student complete with neck beard a deep sense of paranoia. Thank God he doesn't wear an aluminum cap or something strange like that. None of us know how long he has attended the university or exactly what his status is here. We probably have more fun with his quirks than we should, but he is a good friend. He is always saying things that even I know cannot be true about network browsers and computers. He is extremely shy of cell phones and cameras saying all the government needs is a digital photo of you to track your movements.

Well back on this subject; I recently stated I have Awesome New Tab Page as an extension and I removed it months ago because they started Ad-ware on it. I replaced that with New Tab Redirect Plus and created a page in my home under .tabpage/newpage.html complete with icons and whatnot. So I just wanted to correct myself before someone added it and said, Simon you idiot you gave me Ad-ware!!

[GreyGeek]

"Really old guys!"?

I'm one! (And it beats the alternative!)

Simon, around September of 2000, give or take a year, I heard about the University of Nebraska Linux User's Group holding an organizational meeting to elect officers for the new term. This was about two years after I began using Linux full time. There were about 30 students, one prof, a middle aged man and myself in attendance. I was about 60 at the time, gray hair, partially bald. The kids all thought a was a prof teaching there at the University. (I had taught night programming classes for teachers for UNL credit at the HS where I taught in the 70s) The acting chairman had us introduce ourselves. After the election of officers there was a discussion session and I answered some questions about SuSE, which I was using at the time. The newly elected president of the groups, a brilliant foreign student from Brazil (his first name was Carlos, but at the moment I can't recall his last name. The next summer he worked for a startup Linux company called "System 76" ) Anyway, he wanted to ask me a question but couldn't think of my name, so he pointed to me and said "GreyGeek, did .....?", and asked the question. Everyone laughed. I told him that I'll accept that handle as an honor, and it has been my handle every since.

[SteveRiley]

Buuuuut something is seriously wonky -- it won't save any settings or configuration data. I even deleted ~/.config/chromium and started over. The browser writes nothing there. Each time I launch it, the default settings are restored. Weird...

I wrote to Chad Miller yesterday to ask about this behavior. He responded:

The dev and beta PPAs with my name on them are for testing. They use a
temporary directory to keep from advancing your normal personal config
databases to a higher version than the stable versions can read or write.

Thank you for using them. I do want to hear of problems, but that your
settings don't stay past a launch is intentional.

[SteveRiley]

he doesn't wear an aluminum cap or something strange like that

Maybe you should get him one, haha.

He is extremely shy of cell phones and cameras saying all the government needs is a digital photo of you to track your movements.

Does he have a driver license or a passport? If so, then someone already has a digital photo of him. Has he ever wandered into banks or public buildings with closed-circuit monitoring? Then probably multiple someones already have multiple digital images. Bet we can predict his reactions if you tell him all this!