Tag: web browser

As a long time Linux user finding a good and stable web browser have always been important. I used Opera for Linux since v. 7 and was happy with it up to v 12.x. It was my browser, e-mail client and even Usenet news and IRC client.  I could do it all in Opera. Then Opera started lagging behind and I was looking for other options. The two obvious ones were Google Chrome and Firefox. Firefox as the default browser on most major Linux distributions was first of course and I used it for a while without problems. Then Adobe was dropping Flash for Linux and I started having problems with certain Flash based content. I decided to try Chromium and also Chrome and it ended up becoming my new default browser. After some time I ended up Chrome since Chromium also had Flash problems while Chrome has it’s own Pepper Flash implementation making sure you always have the latest version available. Chrome worked very well on Linux and synced without problem between computers and to my Android phone.

Then after a trivial Chrome update the browser stopped working. And since a browser is a piece of software that needs to work all the time I freaked out and went Firefox again but soon got stuck on a site that needed the latest and greatest Flash which Firefox couldn’t offer. I looked for a solution and found a way to get Pepper Flash from Chrome to work in Firefox through a wrapper application. But I still had problems with sites that detected the wrapper and wouldn’t play. Now what? It turned out that the non working Chrome was fixed after a few days and I could return to my prefered browser. 

I had been reading about Google’s Aura graphics stack which replaced GTK+ on Linux, and got it whether I wanted it or not with a recent update. I use Gnome-Shell and was going to install a couple of extensions to my desktop, but no, that didn’t work anymore in Chrome with Aura. Back to Firefox to do that and it works. I then thought I would simply use Firefox again for a while but found out that I for some reason do not have full hardware acceleration working with my graphics card. It turns out it is because Firefox blacklists computers with dual graphics cards like mine has even if one of them has been disabled. In Chrome I have full hardware acceleration, but can’t install Gnome-Shell extensions. 

Finding the perfect browser on Linux has been nearly impossible since I left Opera 12.x, and I’m pretty sure it will continue to be a matter of small compromises until one browser vendor gets it right, or a new shiny browser comes along supporting Linux perfectly. I’m not sure what is most likely to happen.