This is open source  in motion. If Chrome, Webkit, FFMpeg, and various other projects where closed source, we’d be moving along at the rate of molasses, like we did with Adobe’s Flash player, IE, and other proprietary software.

With that praise, there are some interesting holes, and in time they will be filled correctly. Right now the biggest would easily be how HTML 5 video warrants videos going full-screen. There are security and usability land mines that must be dodged, such as allowing web pages to enter this mode without the users consent. While I want the feature right now, I don’t want to play API hopscotch like Adobe did, so I understand some delay in this area.

I also have a growing interest in editing video, which you can’t do on YouTube directly. Somewhere you’ll have to download that video. In the past I’ve used FireFox extensions that do some voodoo to rip the FLV or MP4 stream out, but now that we’re using HTML 5 video – it’s just a file. Without any extensions here is a way to save YouTube videos in Chrome:

1. Go to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and make sure you’re in the HTML 5 beta. You can undo this if you want later.
2. View the page of the video, like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3lzd9yJP9Q (ACTA debate)
3. Right click the video and choose Inspect Element.
4. Double click the div element below the one that is selected. It will have class="video-content-loading". This will expand that element.
5. Click the link in the src element of the video tag.

If the video opens a tab, then you’ll want to change your Chrome settings on how it views/downloads that file. For me it started downloading a 300 mB MP4 file, which was throttled at about 96 kB per second.  It’s nice to have this rather simple workaround, but we can do better!

I’ve never developed Chrome extensions before, but getting started was easy. Having done some FireFox extensions, I would say this is much easier and has a lower barrier of entry. The extension I’m working on is called html5-video-dl and simply puts a button puts the video file URL into the download manager. Browsers that support HTML 5 video will probably do this on their own in the near future. The extension is being tested, packaged, and submitted to the repository. It should be available, and I’ll have a link so you can install it shortly.

Chromium is what you’ll find in your repositories and for the most part looks like a normal open-source package, and indeed it is FOSS. It was started by Google, and they release a version called Google Chrome. So, you can see them as two sides of the same coin. Google will continue to bring the awesome changes from the Chromium project, and you can expect Google to share their code back.

Like many Ubuntu users I started using Chromium via the chromium-daily PPA (Personal Package Archive – Usually a cutting-edge place for packages provided by a user or developer, used to get the latest features of some package) This repository contains a daily build of the Chromium project. This repository, and the project, is a lot more stable, and I use the repository now.

Google’s Chrome (beta) on Ubuntu runs well and is a simple package download, but it completely lacks updates of any kind. I removed it because I wanted a slightly newer feature – Bookmark Synchronization. It worked across Windows and Ubuntu, might I add. Future builds will probably include some system of updates, but the way it looks right now you’ll have to install a package of a later version (update) or remove the beta and install the newer version manually.

The bottom line: Go with the chromium-daily PPA until Google Chrome has some kind of update system and has bookmark sync working.

If you man chromium-browser, assuming you’ve already installed it from the PPA, then you may be tricked into thinking it has no options. I’ve only messed with a few, but they wern’t documented.

Creating an Incognito Launcher

There is a --incogntio option that you can use, but as far as I can tell there is no icon. I’ve done some slight modifications to the icon and you can download that to your desktop and run sudo cp ~/Desktop/chromium-browser-incognito.png /usr/share/pixmaps/ and create a launcher (or download mine).

Opening a page as an Application

Chrome has the idea of making some pages work more like applications. For example they can just have the native window theme borders and no other doodads.

The launcher needs to use chromium-browser --app http://pandora.com, for example to open Pandora.

If you think the web looks fine to you and you’re not interested in upgrading, you might want to consider:

• Web pages have to significantly limit their interfaces for IE6. Google’s GMail and Yahoo’s Mail both provide a more limited interface to this browser.
• The browser is a security nightmare. Users can accidentaly allow malicious software to be installed and executed on the system without even knowing it. It’s history is heavily tainted with security issues of every kind.
• It’s much slower than newer browsers like Google Chrome or even it’s bigger brothers, Internet Explorer 7.0 and 8.0.

So, you’ve decided to upgrade, but to what browser? My personal opinion is that Google Chrome blew everything else out of the water.

Installing Google Chrome

Everything from Google is so easy to do: Just go to http://google.com/chrome and choose their installer. It’s available for most versions of Windows, as well as Mac OS X and Linux. Chrome will allow you to import your old settings from Internet Explorer. Chrome will automatically keep itself updated without bugging you.

Installing Firefox

Mozilla also makes it very easy to get started with using their Firefox. Just download their setup for Windows or Mac OS X. Firefox will allow you to import your old settings from Internet Explorer. Firefox will automatically tell you about updates.

Upgrading Internet Explorer

You can upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer by either:

• Downloading the setup from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer page.
• Connecting to http://update.microsoft.com in Internet Explorer and doing an upgdate process.

Depending on your system there may be an additional step that requires you prove to windows that your copy of Microsoft Windows is “genuine”. Internet Explorer updates come through Windows Update, so you’ll have to have automatic updates enable or check for them manually.