This is probably my third time I tried to use Chromium. First time, I pulled source code and compiled it, the result wasn’t good at all. Second time, I grabbed the binary package from Gentoo tree, it’s okay at the time. But it didn’t support extension at the time. This time, I installed the binary package again. I am satisfied with its performance and almost every bit of it.

However, I am still using Firefox. I just let both browsers sit on my desktop, I mainly opened web pages in Chromium. The reason of keeping Firefox is Chromium didn’t have Vimperator-like extension and I doubted a full port of Vimperator would come in near time. Chromium’s API didn’t allow to do many things, you couldn’t have done what you could do in Firefox yet. Without Vimperator, I have to heavily rely on mouse, I have to move the cursor to click on bookmarks, that was really time wasting. (Typing in address bar isn’t fast enough)

Vimperator enables you to use bookmark’s keyword (which Chromium’s bookmarks do not have such property, you could enter the keyword in Firefox address bar, that is a fast way to use bookmark). I have gm for Gmail, gr for Google Reader, etc. Every time, I need to read emails, I just type (I don’t have to move cursor to anywhere) ogm, five keystrokes send me to my mailbox, it’s quick and fast. But now, I still couldn’t do that in Chromium.

The only similar extension is Vimlike Smooziee1, but it’s just not Vimperator. I didn’t even try it after I watch the video. If you are a fan of Vimperator go to star this issue2, we may have Vimperator on Chromium someday.

Beside Vimperator, I really couldn’t find anything else to complain. With Firefox, I have several addons, but now I have basically only one, the RSS Subscription Extension, and two of mine, Keep Last Two Tabs and Twimonial.

I used to have AdBlock Plus, FlashBlock, Firebug, Screengrab, Zemanta, and Vimperator. I used AdBlock and FlashBlock because Firefox is really a memory hug, I don’t want to have more to eat up memory. Now, I don’t even worry about that. Chromium has Developer Tools, which is similar to Firebug, but Firebug is still more powerful than Developer Tools, however it’s good enough for me. As for Screengrab, I didn’t find an alternative one to use.

Chromium is really fast and clean. I now don’t have to restart the browser every a while. Firefox could easily eat up to 20% of 2G memory by just refreshing a page.

1   Update (2009-12-20)

I found out I forgot to mention one bug. The version I use is 4.0.275.0. The Chromium window will flick about three times when it gets or loses focus.

And there is another thing I just discovered, if you drag tab in Firefox to make a separate window which plays a YouTube video, the page would reload and so would the video. But in Chromium, it works smoothly, the video would be interrupted. Awesome!

[1]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/donnjgnmaheadpiphiedimcjpiefdnnj is gone.
[2]http://code.google.com/p/vimperator-labs/issues/detail?id=139 is gone.