Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

For Chrome, Google takes the Chromium project as a base and adds more connections to Google services. Ungoogled Chromium goes the other direction: it removes everything that connects to Google services (including the “Ad Topics” that would track you in the browser). This is great for privacy! But it also removes things like Safe Browsing and syncing. (I have gotten bookmark sync working with Floccus.)

You also have to jump through hoops to install extensions, since it doesn’t trust the Chrome Web Store! You have to either install and update extensions manually, or manually install another extension that will connect to the web store. The bookmarklet on that page is a convenient way to download an extension from its store page, and I’m copying it here for easy reference:

javascript:location.href='https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=redirect&acceptformat=crx2,crx3&prodversion='+(navigator.appVersion.match(/Chrome\/(\S+)/)[1])+'&x=id%'+'3D'+(document.querySelector('a[href^="./detail"][href$="/report"]').pathname.match(/([^\/]+)\/report$/)[1])+'%'+'26installsource%'+'3Dondemand%'+'26uc';

A few quirks: It’s crashed a couple of times even in the short time I’ve been using it, and it’s run out of memory on lower-spec virtual machines. And (this is weirdly specific) it doesn’t show lines while adding a new way to OpenStreetMap using the online editor.

Otherwise everything in my Chromium review applies here too.

Availability

Packages are available for various Linux distributions, usually in the user-maintained repositories like AUR for Arch or COPR for Fedora, plus a Flatpak, Guix and NixOS. Some, including the Flatpak, are available for both x86_64 and aarch64, while others are Intel/AMD only and lack ARM support (though you could compile it yourself if you really want to). Homebrew provides a package for macOS, and Windows installers are on GitHub. The GitHub page also lists an Android port, but it doesn’t seem to be maintained – the latest release is three years old.

In addition to the extra steps for installing and updating extensions in the first place, the Flatpak has the usual issues connecting to KeePassXC.

Bottom Line

Ungoogled Chromium is a good option to have. But it’s in a weird middle zone. It leaks less data than Chromium or Chrome, but so does, say, Vivaldi. It’s lighter weight too, but not as lightweight as Falkon. For me, the gains aren’t quite enough to make up for the rough edges and missing features. YMMV, of course.

The basis for most web browsers out there today, driven primarily by Google for building Chrome.

As a stand-alone browser it’s not exactly Chrome minus Google (that would be Ungoogled Chromium), but it doesn’t have all the Google branding, tracking, attempts to funnel you into their services…or support for proprietary media.

Not Entirely Stable

It’s effectively the in-development version of Chrome, which means if you just download it from the project website, it’s not always stable. And it doesn’t auto-update. They really don’t make it easy and would rather you test things with a proper Chrome beta or “canary” build.

In short, you probably don’t want to use it as your primary browser…at least not on Windows or macOS.

Better on Linux

Major Linux distributions (Fedora, for instance) do include stable versions of Chromium in their software repositories. There’s a Flatpak (and probably a Snap) for other distros, on both AMD_64 and ARM (aarch64).

Though it’s still visibly slower than Vivaldi on my system.

Google Connections

I thought I remembered syncing Chromium with Chrome for a while a few years back, but that doesn’t seem to be possible anymore. I couldn’t get version 132 on Debian to sign in, and version 133 on Fedora doesn’t even offer the feature.

It does include features like safe browsing (which can check downloads or URLs against Google for malware) and the new advertising topics (tracking in the browser) (which was the final straw for me to ditch Chrome and switch to Vivaldi) so you’ll still want to fine-tune your settings as to what you are and aren’t willing to send.

Extensions

Chromium is hooked up to the regular Chrome Web Store and you can install just about anything. Floccus works just fine for syncing bookmarks, and KeePassXC-Browser works for filling passwords – if you’re using native packages for both KeePass and Chromium. (It’s a pain to get native messaging running through a Flatpak or Snap, and I still haven’t managed to get it to work on my system.)

Bottom Line

Chromium is a great, versatile engine. As a browser itself, even the stable Linux packages still feel like a first draft with placeholders for things like syncing. Google fills in those placeholders for Chrome. Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, etc. fill them in for their own browsers. Vivaldi is my current favorite of these, followed by Falkon on low-spec hardware

A fun frontier/sailing adventure in a throwback sort of way, but nothing really special. Sort of a mashup of Moby Dick…IN SPAAAACE with everyone based out of a corrupt frontier town. The title refers to the planet’s slow rotation, only four day/night cycles in a year, which makes the surface uninhabitable during the long, boiling days and freezing nights.

Characters include the scrappy teen reporter, the town drunk with suspiciously good reflexes, the corrupt union boss colluding with the corrupt corporate representative, rugged sea captains, and the school principal who figures if he can handle a bunch of kids, he can handle an unruly mob.

It appears to be set in the same universe as Little Fuzzy, but it’s more interested in telling an adventure than asking big questions. Which is fine – I probably would have liked it a lot more at, say, 10 or 12.

1. The Reign of the Departed
2. The Kingdoms of the Cursed
3. The Realm of the Deathless

This trilogy is not Greg Keyes’ best work.

The concept is really interesting: Our world has no magic because it’s the last stop in a series of realities, each of which has less magic than the next one up (and yes, it’s a series of shadows, like Roger Zelazny’s Amber). The higher and farther away, the purer the stories and stronger the magic. And they’ve all been cursed. In most of them, adults have been taken out of the picture one way or another, leaving only teenagers and children to pick up the pieces…sometimes disastrously.

The main characters are interesting too: Aster is a refugee from the more magical realms, living in our world and trying to get back on a quest. She puts Errol’s consciousness in a wooden body while he’s in a coma, coming to grips with his suicide attempt. Veronica is the kind of ghost who sparks urban legends, brought back somewhere between life and death. They all grow over the course of the series, and they all read as teenagers (including the kinds of mistakes they make!)

But…

The editing is bad, especially by the third book, which is extremely disjointed. The resolution comes completely out of nowhere, despite having three whole books to set it up. A current of misogyny runs through the first two books, with a constant threat of sexual violence by the villains hanging over everything, which is made worse by the fact that almost everyone is a teenager. That dissipates by the third book, but it makes parts of the others really unpleasant to read.

I picked them all up at once, knowing only that an author I used to keep up with had written a bunch of books that I’d missed. If I’d been reading them one at a time, as they came out, I don’t think I would have finished. And I rarely leave books unfinished. I really hope the other two books of his that I bought at the same time are better than these.

I’d absolutely recommend the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone quadrilogy, Age of Unreason, or The Waterborn and The Blackgod. But not this one.

I’ve found Falkon to be a good balance of features and light weight for low-end hardware like the PineTab2 and virtual machines running Linux. It’s more capable (and compatible!) than NetSurf or Dillo, and faster than Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi or Angelfish. It also runs well under LXQT, which I like to use on that low-spec (and virtual) hardware for the same reason.

It does all the basics you expect of a modern browser, and because it’s built on Chromium (via QtWebEngine), it’s less likely to run into actual incompatibilities than sites that think they’re incompatible.

You can send a page from your phone to your desktop using KDE Connect (which despite its name can also run on Gnome and other desktops), and if Falkon is your default browser, it’ll pick it up. I haven’t found a good way to send tabs from Falkon to a phone, though.

Problems and Workarounds

• It doesn’t run Chromium extensions (or Firefox add-ons for that matter), and there are only a few dozen Falkon extensions at this time.
• There’s no way to connect directly to an external password manager like KeePassXC (or Bitwarden, as OSNews’ article points out). I’ve worked around this by using KeePassXC’s auto-type feature. It’s more cumbersome than auto-detecting in the browser, but still faster than copying and pasting – and much faster than typing manually.
• Bookmarklets (JavaScript bookmarks) aren’t allowed to open new windows by default, which is actually a sensible decision. There’s a preference to allow JavaScript to open pop-up windows, which makes things like my Postmarks bookmarklet actually, y’know, work:

  Preferences → Privacy-General → JavaScript Options → Open popup windows

• There’s no bookmark sync capability, even using extensions. For now I’ve just put the main links for my Nextcloud Bookmarks and Postmarks instances in the toolbar and using them directly, but it would be nice to be able to use the built-in UI. I’ve been contemplating hacking together a script to download from Nextcloud and update the bookmarks file as a one-way sync, but haven’t gotten around to it.
• It can’t install PWAs (portable web applications). Then again, neither can desktop versions of Firefox.

But I can log into Dropbox or Nextcloud (they complain, but let me use it anyway) or any webmail client and it does what I need it to in a reasonable amount of time!

Flatpak Issues

When installed through Flatpak, launchers get confused if Falkon is already running: It opens a new instance of the program, complete with all the windows and tabs you had open the last time you closed it, in addition to the one still running.

On XFCE specifically, I also have trouble setting Falkon as the default browser if it’s been installed through Flatpak: It doesn’t show up in the list of applications for setting a default web browser, so you have to manually add the full flatpak run org.kde.falkon "%s" command as a custom browser. Adding that makes it work as the default browser for opening links, but the “Web Browser” launcher won’t run it.

Haiku

Falkon also runs on Haiku, an alternative operating system inspired by the late, lamented BeOS. The version in Haiku Depot is a bit out of date, and I’ve only experimented a little with the OS as a whole, so take this with a grain of salt. It seems to handle more websites than WebPositive (Haiku’s native web browser), but it’s not quite as stable. Or as stable as Falkon itself on Linux. A few sites just don’t show text. But it mostly works, and I can imagine alternating between the two as needed if I spent more time in Haiku!

Availability on Linux

Fedora and Arch packages seem to be kept reasonably up to date (no surprise), and you don’t have to install too much of KDE if you’re running it on another desktop. Debian stable lags behind (also no surprise), but the current Flatpak runs just fine (there’s also a Snap) unless I try to open way too many tabs. All packages are available for both x86_64 and aarch64, which why it’s even possible for me to run it on my ARM-based Pine tablet!