There appears to be a typo on the “getting-involved” page itself, the name of the directory on Ubuntu is /etc/default not /etc/defaults.
I first tried it on my desktop. That didn’t last long as I found the fonts to be abominable.
I then tried it on my netbook. There I had no issue with the fonts. The performance of this “early access” release of Chrome is clearly better than 3.0.10 Firefox for my typical usages (e.g., gmail), though to be fair that’s clearly comparing effectively a year old codebase against one that is presumably targeted for sometime in 2H09. What ended up being an issue there was my inability to manage bookmarks or get a change to the value of the homepage to stick. That, and an inability to recognize a self-signed certificate that I use for a private application that I host within my firewall. I also found that I missed the ability to use / as a shortcut for “find”.
I don’t see me changing my usage on my desktop as I don’t currently have any “pain points” with Firefox, but I can definitely see me switching on my NetBook later this year if Chrome continues to be appreciably faster that the version of the browser that ships with Karmic Koala.
You might want to give the Chromium daily build PPA on your Ubuntu machines. Some of the buglets (and unfulfilled features) you mention are already fixed.
Firefox is just far too slow for me; I’ve already noticed that even IE8 loads up faster. I just can’t stand waiting for almost ten seconds for an application to start.
What version is the Linux build of Chrome? Is it starting on 3.x, or is it still on 2.x?
The Linux version of Chrome that I installed is 3.0.183.1. I haven’t tried Chromium.
Again, speed has not been an issue for me on my desktop, but is a consideration for my NetBook. IE8 is not an option for me on either machine (both are running Ubuntu).
Speed is becoming a really big issue for me in 3.0.X firefoxen. It freezes like 3 seconds after every load/refresh, eats lots of memory and crashes frequently on plugin activation on ubuntu 9.04
Chrome (your very same version) is one order of magnitude faster. It has no flash or other plugins, though, no adblock or flashblock either, and I can’t type accented chars (but I can use “ñ” or “€”, so it is a dead key problem) as major and only observed problems.
I’m surprised that you have no pain points with FireFox 3.x. I work on a 3 year old Ubuntu machine, and I’ve grown frustrated with the slow speed of FireFox. It is the slowest piece of software that I work with. Applications such as Gimp and Kate are as fast as I expect, but FireFox runs with many slow pauses. For instance, I might try to put the cursor in the address bar so I can type an address. FireFox waits 3 or 4 seconds before the cursor moves. Or I will try to type a comment, like this one, in a textarea box, and the text won’t appear until several seconds after I’m done typing, and then it suddenly appears. Or, if I’m working in another application, and alt-tab to switch to FireFox, and 10 seconds go by before FireFox comes to the front. Such long pauses have been driving me crazy. Possibly the real problem is with the plugins I haave installed - Session Manager and FireBug. But, on Windows, Google Chrome is much, much faster than FireFox, and Chrome comes with something like Session Manager and Firebug built-in.