Open Source Living : Browsers

Open source software has got to be one of the coolest things to hit planet earth in a long time. Anyone who's asked me about open source software knows my opinions well. That or they have no idea because they tune out about five minutes into my giddy speech about it. Either way, it's no secret that I'm a big fan. With all that being said, I have spent a lot of time researching open source alternatives to my old day-to-day options. Working 100% in Linux all the time, open source is about all you have. With that, let's talk about browsers. For my day-to-day browser, I typically use Chromium. It is fast, installs fine on the two distros I use (Debian and Arch), has incredible developer tools built in, and has no odd dependencies on weird libraries that require me to install all kinds of stuff I don't want just to use it (ie: Gnome or KDE stuff). It's just plain and simple Chromium.

Many of you have no doubt heard of Google Chrome and are wondering why not that. Google Chrome is a branch/rebrand of the Chromium project, which was in fact started by Google. Chromium is not Google branded and often contains functionality that is soon to come to Google Chrome. Here's a screenshot (it's normally a bit brighter I'm just using a dark theme on my compy 386).



Other open source browsers...
 * Mozilla Firefox
 * Midori
 * Ice Weasel (a fork of Mozilla Firefox)