Moved from Firefox to Chromium

I have moved from Firefox to Chromium for several weeks. Firefox is excellent in many aspects, especially its abundant and wonderful add-ons. However, in my own experience, it is not really fast. After some trials and findings, I decided to use Chromium as my default browser.

I would like to share some experiences here. Some are the excellent features of Chromium, and of course some are not so good.



1. Synchronization
When using Chromium, you don't need to synchronize the bookmarks or plugins of your browsers which might be installed in your laptops and PCs. You can set the synchronization in ``Preferences --> Personal Stuff --> Sync.''

You can click ``Customize...'' button to change the settings. It is extremely convenient because the synchronization syncs not only the bookmarks but also your extensions, themes, and almost everything else. So when you change some settings in the browser in one of your PC, you don't need to rework on other browsers installed in your other machines.

2. Change the Colors
I like to view webpages in black background with white fonts, just like that in command line consoles. If you are like me, the Change Colors extension might be handy for you. There are three levels to apply or to remove the color settings: this page, this domain, and all pages. The following pictures are my blog before and after the colors changed.

The first problem I've encountered is about images. Some images on webpages become invisible after applying the color change. The colorful logo of Google is one of them, and the equations on Wikipedia (which have transparent background) is another one. Another problem is for some widgets with bright background. Because the text has been set as bright color, but we can not change the widgets' colors as well, this will cause the text difficult to view.

3. StumbleUpon Toolbar
As far as I know, there are two methods to use StumbleUpon in Chromium:

1. StumbleUpon Toolbar for Chrome – How to Use StumbleUpon on Google Chrome
2. StumbleUpon Extension for Chrome Now Officially Available!

The first one is older but less buggy. Although, the second one is an official extension, it cause some problems when showing the results of ``Google images.'' With the official toolbar enabled, I can search images with Google, but always get blank pages when I click the links of searching results. I don't know whether it is a bug of the StumbleUpon official extension. It is just my quick conclusion based on my tests.

4. YouTube Downloaders
In Firefox, I am used to 1-Click YouTube Video Download. In Chromium, I think YouTube Downloader is doing good works. (At the moment of writing this article, I found the link of YouTube Downloader failed, and the extension can not be found on Chromium webpage. Hope it is just temporary.)

5. Navigate as in Vim
Maybe this is just important for Vim users. I found Vrome for Chromium, but its searching function is slow and strange. Sometimes the searching seems get stuck. I am still prefer Vimperator so far, which is for Firefox. Maybe I have not known very well about Vrome, so I can't utilize its capabilities properly.

Summery
There are useful extensions for Chromium. Most of them are capable of doing works well but may be not so good as their counterparts of Firefox. Chromium has good integration with Google, and Firefox has powerful add-ons.