Crossover Chromium First Looks - Slippy plays at being a proper blogger!

First, what is Crossover Chromium? Well, at first glance it appears to be a linux port of an open source version of the framework upon which the Google Chrome browser was built, and it is even downloadable as a linux package or a Mac .dmg file. Still, it requires Wine, and was developed by CodeWeavers as a "technology proof-of-concept to demonstrate Wine’s capabilities for rapidly migrating Windows software to new marketplaces, such as Linux and Mac." [http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/] In this capacity, they've already proved themselves - they got Google Chrome running on Linux before Google did!

The download only took a few seconds, so I fired it up in GDebi on my Ubuntu Gnome system. Took a few minutes to install, but I was doing a whole bunch of other stuff, so no biggie. Post-install, cxChromium appears to get its own menu under the Applications menu, so it's no challenge to locate as *some* downloadable packages tend to be. All good so far, I click the button and *shazam*

Cool. It even calls itself "Google Chrome". Remember, to get Google Chrome running in Linux you have to tweak up a few things, and it's a little bit hit-and-miss, if you manage to get it working at all (I didn't manage it). I didn't make any preperations at all before installing cxChromium, it just worked, straight outta the box. This, I imagine, is the "power of Wine" the guys at CodeWeavers are so keen to demonstrate.

The first obvious thing about cxChromium - apart from the blisteringly fast initial speed, that is - are the visual failings common to most of the windows apps I've run under wine - some fonts are badly rendered, looking very wobbly and clear. The fonts used in 3d elements mean that most button captions in varying dialogs are bigger than the buttons they are displayed on, so only part of the caption is seen.

The blue status bar which seems to occupy about a third of the width of the window looks like a great idea, but it has the somewhat annoying habit of obscuring the bottom of whatever page is viewed. In Google Reader, for example, only the top edge of the "Previous Item" button is visible above the status bar. Cleverly, if I move my mouse just so, it slides down out of the way, but only in Google Reader so far, not in Docs or in Friendfeed. Even this is not so straightforward though: I have to move my mouse top to bottom, and it has to be above the left-hand two thirds of the status bar itself. If I'm directly on the status bar, or too far to the right (hovering over the button I want to press, for example), it stubbornly stays where it is.

Now, onto the speed thing. It was pretty quick on first load, so I thought I'd dump a bit of strain on it, and see what happens. I opened friendfeed, google reader and google docs, all at once. Each has a lot of items on display for me, and would normally bring firefox to a crawl on my system after one to two hours of use. They all loaded fairly quickly, although after apparent completion, the status bar still said "waiting for friendfeed.com" for a couple of minutes. After about 10 minutes, cxChromium already seems to be struggling a little, but it's not too bad. In fact, after another couple of minutes of use, it seems to be quite quick again. Perhaps the slowdown was more due to my old computer than anything else. Scrolling is a little jerky, as is the switching of tabs, but again, I think this is pretty common to Wine apps on my particular system, and may or not be so on your system.

So, in summary, it's nice to be able to see what all the fuss is about, and cxChromium is a nice-looking, neat little product that worked for me, straight out of the box. Obviously, it suffers for the fact that it is a Windows executable being run in a compatibility layer, however, if we leave such considerations aside, it appears to be a thoroughly capable little browser. It's quick to load, which gives it an immediate advantage over both Firefox and Prism. I may well use it from time to time, perhaps if I need to visit a site quickly but don't already have a browser open, but it's a long way from replacing Firefox in my opinion. It's debatable if it will ever be completely smooth running on a Linux system, if only because of the Wine thing, but unless or until Google get Chrome for Linux into the repositories, it's the best approximation of Chrome we've got.

My final thought on this app is about one of it's selling points - the fact that it's built around a different framework to either Firefox or Internet Explorer. You know what? I don't really care what's going on under the hood - neither in my browser, nor my OS - just so long as the end product works. If cxChromium or Google Chrome for Linux end up being more stable and better at withstanding marathon browsing sessions than Firefox and Prism currently are, and if either is as visually appealing as Chrome is under Vista, then I may well consider making the switch, but not before. Until such a time comes to pass, if I need to check a site quickly, and it doesn't rely on Flash or Javascript and stuff, I'll just switch to a terminal and open the Links text browser - loads instantly, refreshes instantly - even Chrome can't touch it for speed.