John W. Foster wrote: > Not sure what the issue is, but, I recently installed debian stable > chromium and set it as the default browser.
This is one of areas where I completely disagree with the Debian methodology. Debian shipped Chromium and Firefox/Iceweasel in their stable release. That was bad. It was bad because it allowed you to install it thinking it would be what you wanted. But it isn't. It can't be. It's availability causes problems. Also not having it would also cause problems. The upstream release model is to modify and release it every few weeks. That type of release model is incompatible with a stable operating system release model. In my opinion the best case would be putting fast moving web browsers into one of the "volatile" areas such as the previously named "debian-volatile" repository now somewhat confusingly known as "squeeze-updates". That would have been better than Stable main. It should track upstream closer than is allowed by the rules of main. The Debian Iceweasel team has addressed this problem by creating an additional supplemental repository with newer Firefox versions. This is located at: http://mozilla.debian.net/ Note that this is at debian.net and not debian.org and represents an addition to Debian but strictly speaking is not part of the Debian release infrastructure. But it is of high quality and works well with it within the limitations imposed by the upstream. I recommend using it for Debian Stable desktop browsing. For example at this moment Iceweasel in Debian Stable is 3.5.16. A debian-backport from Unstable is available at 10.0.5esr. The latest available is 13.0.1 from mozilla.debian.net (also available in Experimental). The 3.5 version in Debian Stable is now looking very unsuitable for general purpose use on the fast changing external world wide web. [As a side discussion, with the Firefox ESR versions there are now two tracks available. There is a more stable Extended Stable Release in addition to the latest bleeding edge. Since Unstable is a development track for Testing and Stable then this is the version in Unstable. The latest version is available in Experimental.] Unfortunately there is not an equivalent repository for Chromium. There could be. It would be wonderful if there were. But at this time no one has gone through the work to actually do it. This leaves Chromium users of Debian Stable at a disadvantage as compared to Firefox/Iceweasel users. Because of this I cannot recommend Chromium use for Debian Stable users. Instead I think you should use Firefox/Iceweasel from the instructions at the http://mozilla.debian.net/ page. However I do actually support a group that is using Chromium as their default browser on Debian Stable. I do so by using a Sid chroot. By using Sid's archive on Stable it allows me to support the current Chromium version with little effort. This isn't trivial to set up but it is relatively easy. It would be too much detail to go into here but basically debootstrap a Sid chroot and then mount it up such that local users running chromium invoke the Sid version. This works acceptably well. There are some drawbacks. Notably when users download files such as .doc files they cannot open them with the system's libreoffice directly from chromium since that would open them in the chroot and I am not providing libreoffice in the chroot. Instead after downloading they must open the document from the system such as through a file manager. Issues like this are why the Iceweasel solution from mozilla.debian.net is better. But this does provide the latest Chromium running on Stable which would otherwise not be available. Bob
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