Quick tip for Chromium Browser users: The official Ubuntu Chromium Browser beta and dev channel PPAs are unmaintained for a long time but there are a couple of PPAs you can use to get the latest beta and development Chromium builds in Ubuntu.

This package no longer works and it shouldn't be used. Install the adobe-flashplugin package from the Ubuntu Partner repository (to enable it, open Software & Updates, on the Other Software tab) instead.


A Pepper Flash Player installer for Chromium browser has been added to the official Ubuntu 14.04 repositories.

Quick tip: If you use Chrome or Chromium browsers and hardware acceleration is disabled for your graphics card, you can try to force it to get better video playback performance (for instance on YouTube) as well as support for features such as the 3D Earth view in the new Google Maps.

Profile Sync Daemon is a tool to move the web browser profile to RAM, using tmpfs, which has the advantage of reducing disk writes (useful for SSDs, some would say), increased speed and responsiveness.

The tool supports most browsers: Chromium, Google Chrome, Firefox (stable, beta, aurora and firefox-trunk), Conkeror, Midori, Opera (including Opera Next) and Qupzilla and is based on an old script (we've covered it on WebUpd8 back in 2009), with some extra features: this is a daemonized script and has recovery protection, as well as support for all the above mentioned browsers as opposed to the old script which only supports Firefox. It's also a lot easier to use.

Since RAM content is cleared on reboot, Profile Sync Daemon automatically syncs the profile back to the physical disk using a symbolic link and rsync at a given time interval. Furthermore, the profile is synced back to the hard disk before you shut down or restart your computer, so no profile data is lost. Still, use it at your own risk!

Reading the Debian Planet, I stumbled upon a blog post which states that Chromium Browser has been removed from Debian Testing which means it won't be included in Debian Squeeze, the next stable Debian release.

The reason for this is the fact that the internal webkit copy in Chromium 5 is very old and has lots of security issues which are not properly fixed upstream.

This won't affect Ubuntu as it maintains its own Chromium packages, but it does bring serious concerns regarding Chromium because it means that if you want to be secure, you'll have to run the bleeding edge version of Chromium which is not included in any Linux distribution official repositories.

Dragon Player has been made default in Kubuntu 10.10 instead of Kaffeine (I'm not really up to date with what's happening in Kubuntu, but it seems Kaffeine was default in Kubuntu 10.10 until now - at least according to the changelog of the kubuntu-meta package). A while back, the Kubuntu developers said they were considering VLC to be the default media player but unfortunately this didn't work out as expected. I'm not sure what are the reasons for this (since the news came from the kubuntu-meta changelog), but most probably there were some license/legal issues so they had to go with Dragonplayer.

It seems Google wants to move everything in the tabs - not only through its web apps, but with Chrome too.

A recent change in Chrome / Chromium removes the Options dialog as a separate window and you can now access it from a browser tab. This should make it a lot easier to implement changes to the Chrome / Chromium interface across different platforms.

I'm not sure if there are other reasons for implementing this, but I for one am very glad to be able to change the Chromium options from a tab instead of a window as it was a real pain to open the Options window on my netbook.

Ever since I started using Chrome (Chromium to be more specific), there was one thing which really annoyed me: AdBlock for Google Chrome / Chromium. AdBlock used to firstly load the ads and only then block them - something which seems very primitive to someone coming from Firefox where AdBlock Plus successfully blocks ads before they download... since forever.

Finally the Chrome web apps almost make sense: initially the Chrome web apps were just a normal pinned tab with a bigger favicon but now the Omnibar together with the menu and the bookmarks bar has been removed so you have a lot more vertical space for a web app tab than for a normal Chrome tab. This change comes in the latest build from the Chromium daily PPA (but it's probably in the latest Google Chrome dev channel too).


Note that the Omnibar / bookmarks toolbar has only been remove for the web apps tabs, the rest of the tabs still have everything in place.

But the major feature for Chrome web apps has yet to come: built-in notifications.

See how to use Chrome web apps for Google Chrome / Chromium.

Google Chrome got web apps a few days ago, which initially only worked for Windows - but starting today they're available for Linux too. These are basically just pinned tabs but with a bigger (and .png instead of .ico) favicon which looks cool but doesn't do anything extra from what I can tell after testing it for about 10 minutes or so.

Google is testing a new "unified" menu for Chromium which combines the options and wrench menus into a single menu to save space. What I find very interesting about this "unified" menu is that it uses buttons for cut, copy and paste as well as for the zoom controls.

After getting encrypted passwords in Linux, Chromium users can finally synchronize passwords across multiple computers.

All you have to do is install Chromium from the Chromium Daily PPA and then launch it with the "--enable-sync-passwords" option (and of course, also use the encrypted passwords option!!).

WebUpd8 reader Nikola writes:

A message on the Chromium dev group points out that the Chromium Linux builds got encrypted passwords which use GNOME Keyring or KDE KWallet. Until now, Chromium / Google Chrome used to store the passwords unencrypted which combined with the fact that Chromium doesn't use a master password can be seen as a major security flow.

The passwords have always been encrypted on Mac and Windows, so now it's time for Linux to get this feature too.

The Chromium developers have been working on extensions sync for some time, but this feature only became functional today. However, it is not available by default for now so you must manually enable it. Here is how to extensions sync in Chromium.

To set the minimum font size in Chromium (Linux), you must edit the ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences file:

gedit ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences

The latest Chromium build adds a new feature that converts user script into extensions, so you no longer need to copy the scripts into a folder.

Simply go to userscripts.org, click on a user.js file and an installation dialog will pop up, asking you if you want to install it:

Since the user scripts are installed as extensions, they are of course available in chrome://extensions/: