lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Jeremy Bicha <jbicha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 9 November 2011 06:03, Leszek Lesner <leszek.lesner@xxxxxx> wrote:

> In my view Chromium offers still better features than firefox. Just look
> at the HTML5 capabilities it just beats firefox here with in my view
> important things just like HTML5 videoplayback (H264 is supported)

Google is dropping H264 support:
http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html

> or the fact that every browser tab in chromium is running as a different
> process in a sandbox which makes a crash of one tab not concerning for
> other tabs.

Firefox might do that in the future also, but it costs memory to
sandbox each browser tab. And I believe Chromium cheats: when
available memory gets too low, tabs begin sharing the same process so
it's a bit harder to know what's really going on.

> All in all I am in flavor of Chromium as its still faster and offers the
> better features.

That's a bit subjective as Firefox also offers unique features: It's
possible to run a few hundred tabs in Firefox; the design of
Chromium's tabbar makes that much more painful in Chromium. Firefox
has a much more powerful addon framework (although Chromium may
improve this next year). The user has more control over his data with
Firefox Sync than with Google's version.

While I'm not a Google-hater, I think it's very important for the free
web that Mozilla continues to exist. Since Mozilla is a bit more open
than Chromium and multiple steps more open than Android, I think open
source fans should consider supporting Firefox if the features are
nearly equal, which in my opinion they are. This is why I hope Firefox
continues to remain the Ubuntu default browser. Since Lubuntu has
different constraints in choosing default apps, I'll let Julien and
the Lubuntu devs make their own evaluation. Both browsers are fully
supported in Ubuntu (Canonical is looking to hire someone who can help
maintain Chromium).

Jeremy