chromium

Browsing the web is a daily activity, where thousands and thousands of webpages are visited, helping us to obtain informations related to subjects of interest, downloading packages, etc.

Unity Web History lens gathers, categorizes and displays one's visited webpages in the Dash, allowing users to easily access visited webpages by simply typing a word and opening (by clicking on it) the desired item.

Part of a complete, enjoying and productive experience is smooth scrolling, especially when dealing with large "pieces" of content, such as with web-browsers.

Just now, an exciting news (which is real code) has been made available, announcing (and demoing) a new optimized Chromium web-browser scrolling when in usage on touch-enabled machines.

Chromium web-browser 15 stable has been released with numerous bug fixes and exciting new features.

What is new in Chromium 15?

Smooth scrolling is, generally speaking, web-browser specific and can be usually installed via third-party extensions/add-ons (in Ubuntu 11.10 smooth scrolling can be observed even in the file manager, making use of Ayatana Overlay Scrollbars).

Chromium 12 final has been released just now (has already landed in Oneiric Ocelot and should be available in Natty Narwhal in a matter of hours via the main repositories) bringing:

• long-awaited appmenu integration (to enable it, run Chromium 12, type in its Omnibox/URL bar about:flags, enable "Experimental GNOME menu bar support" and hit the "Relaunch Now" button

Chrome/ium is a great web-browser, but doesn't quite properly integrate with GTK+2/+3 (specially from its scrollbars point-of-view).

If you're using GNOME 3 (with Adwaita GTK+3 theme) or, you just like Adwaita's thick scrollbars, take a look and install "Adwaita (GNOME 3) scrollbars", but, keep in mind that this Chrome/ium extension works great in Natty, Maverick, etc (with any GTK+2 theme).

Steadyflow 0.1.6 is a neat download manager with a fancy look and extra options (compared with the built-in download manager in web-browsers) that just fits in Natty with the new appindicator support.

Although Mozilla Firefox and Epiphany have previously received support (through FlashGot and Ephyflow), Chromium lacked integration with Steadyflow.

The last weeks clearly show us the love between Chromium and Unity.

First, Chromium introduced in its daily builds the Application Menu ("appmenu") support, then the progress bar&badge for the active downloads in the Unity dock, and , just now Chromium 13 daily build has received quicklist support (on the Unity dock).

The open-source web-browser, Chromium 13 (daily build) is now better integrated into Unity, thanks to its new badge (number of downloads) and progress bar support for active downloads.

All you have to do is to add the Chromium daily PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

We are used to, in Ubuntu, that every release should (and actually does) bring a decent amount of innovation and creativity in fields like user interface, new features, real-estate optimizations, etc.

One quite interesting project that generates much attention and appreciation in Natty Narwhal is "Ayatana Overlay Scrollbars", fancy functional way to get high-quality scrolling, more screen space and a modern UI.

The problem is that, in Ubuntu 11.04, are "heavy" applications that don't use this scrollbars (Firefox, Chromium, etc).