Community Chromium and Google Chrome on Eeebuntu Netbook

As I have mentioned before I'm testing these two browsers alongside each other to check what , if anything will change between them, and there are a few things that have become apparent. The downloads of the Google version are significantly smaller that the community version, almost half the the size. Why? I can only conclude that they must be removing some parts of the code or using a more efficient compression.

The second thing is that the community version is always ahead of the Google verision, and is offering more features more quickly. This is because the Google version is based on the community Chromium version, so not that surprising, but it means the community version is more interesting.

An example of this is in the current releases - Chromium 3.0.190 and Google Chrome 3.0.189 - I can change my default search engine in Chromium but not Google Chrome, which means I'm using Chromium to type this while in France, but with Google Chrome I would have to be doing it in French. For those who don't know, Google detects what country you are in and without asking you , puts all you Google apps in that countries language. Not very useful when you travel around Europe a lot, but need to work in English. I have had the same problem with Firefox, but you can work around this by installing another default search engine from mozilla.org.

I have to say on an Asus 1000 running the latest version of Eeebuntu 3.0, that both versions absolutely fly along. This can not be underestimated as an extremely useful feature on a netbook. They are much quicker than the version of Firefox 3.5 I'm also testing which is itself much quicker that version 3.0. The Chromium interface also suits the netbook genre very well, which is why I have made my installed version of Firefox look very similar.

Unfortunately neither of these versions is feature complete yet, so no flash etc, but they are great for a whole host of other functions, like typing on my blog so I will use both of them alongside each other until Chromium fully comes of age.