A Chromium excursion to make arguing more convenient

Chatting with my friends on Instagram on my PC, in the middle of a heated argument. Click on reply… wait… still not seeing any progress, I just start writing… when I’m done, I press enter. Maybe 5 seconds have passed and still nothing. Another second passes and the message finally gets displayed, first as a message being written, then as a message about to get sent, and after another wait it gets sent. Sending just one message took about 7 seconds, not counting the time it took me to write the message. That is outrageous!

I’m a proud Firefox user. I love the customizability, the open-source aspect, the attention to user privacy and about a dozen other things I could probably find if I tried hard enough. As such however, I seem to be a part of an oppressed minority of Gecko-based-browser users (Firefox and its forks being about the only modern ones). The absolute majority¹ of users online use Blink-based browsers – i.e. Chromium and its derivatives – and because of that, most webapp developers don’t care about Firefox because they simply have no reason to cater to such a minority of users. This is most notably seen with massive webapps like Instagram or Google Docs, which are often optimized for Chromium specifically with Firefox being left lacking. It is not unheard of that some webapps intentionally ship slower bundles to Firefox compared to Chrome (or more accurately, less optimized ones – mostly because of historical assumptions about what Gecko supports).

I’m on record as saying that I’d cut up my dick and eat it before I’d switch to Google Chrome. Apart from privacy concerns, another reason why I’m using Firefox is because I don’t like the idea of Google having a complete monopoly on the browser scene. It is already a strong dominant player, I don’t want to be contributing to that even more than necessary. However, ethical concerns like this go aside a lot easier when your damn Instagram message takes 7 seconds just to get sent. Desperate situations call for desperate actions – and I find myself looking for a replacement Chromium-based browser. For many reasons, including my preference for my penis to stay out of my digestive system and attached to my body in one piece, I still wanted the replacement browser to be open-source and somewhat privacy respecting.

I came across Helium. This seems to be a really cool project, it fulfilled most of my basic criteria for this search (vertical tabs, no Manifest v3, no Brave) and as a bonus, it was readily available from the COPR repositories of Fedora. I installed it – the setup wizard was good-looking and very user friendly, in no more than 10 minutes I had set up my search engine preferences (Kagi was there as one of the default options, yay!) and imported my history and bookmarks – and I was ready to roll.

Last time I used something else than Firefox on my computer was sometime around the year 2020, where I made it a task for the quarantine to try out about every browser that existed. That was also about the time where I settled on Firefox and didn’t use anything else extensively since. That provided me with a multitude of “first” expressions as well as (mostly negative) memories of Chromium. For example – I used it on my laptop using a touchpad – whenever I tried to scroll a page the same way I would in Firefox, the text I was reading would just fly away instantly, likely approaching the speed of light. At the same time, there was no momentum simulation, meaning the scrolling stopped abruptly the moment I dared to lift my fingers off the touchpad. Almost instantly I recognized this as something I didn’t like, and as something that I didn’t find a way to change (apart from extensions (really? what is this, a Mac?), which also made the integral-to-me touchpad gesture to go back a page stop working, while still failing to make the scrolling experience as good as on Firefox).

Another issue I faced was with the theming. As I dare say most Linux users, I run a tiling window manager with theming I put together myself. As such, it would annoy me to no end if my browser (of all things, the program I spend the most time in) broke this beautiful harmony of apps that all use the same colour palette. I tried to opt for the easiest – and also the only – solution I knew: opening the Chrome Web Store (it’s just the name that makes me want to vomit), switching to the Themes tab and searching the name of the palette. Trying all ~10 available Gruvbox themes, I discovered that they were all utterly unsatisfactory. If they matched the shade of my polybar at the top (which they usually didn’t, presumably using gruvbox-light), they all turned out to have the same issue: I hated the active/inactive tab distinction. In my Firefox theme (which I found on Mozilla Addons and use without customization), an inactive tab was of the same colour as the background, an the active tab was a little darker and had an orange border around it. To my surprise, all of the Chrome themes worked completely illogically from my point of view: the active tab was the only tab to be background-coloured, while all of the inactive tabs were a darker shade of grey. To me, that is absolutely disgusting, chaotic and I can’t see myself using this. Another of my complaints is about the UI itself, which to me looks like Firefox with the “Compact” option (that it used to have just a few years ago) turned on. Again, not a fan.

After all of this, I wanted to find a different browser I would actually like. I found Vivaldi, a browser which already didn’t start off very well: for starters, it’s proprietary (although it’s only the UI layer of the browser that is, it’s still something I’d prefer to avoid), then it isn’t in Fedora repositories, forcing me to use Flatpak or use a .rpm file, and finally it’s extremely bloated. Knowing this, I downloaded the browser anyway, quickly ran through the settings menu and noped out after about 10 minutes. (Thankfully I didn’t even close the terminal where I installed it, so I could conveniently type the flatpak remove com.vivaldi.Vivaldi command.)

Judging by all of this, switching to a different browser altogether isn’t a real solution to this problem. So what is? Well; before doing anything described in this article, I wanted to try if Instagram really would be snappier in Chromium compared to Firefox. For this, I used regular ol’ vanilla Chromium, and it really was (which could obviously also be influenced by the lack of extensions, but it was by a lot). I then remembered that at the very beginning, Chromium offered me to “Install app”. This creates a shortcut which, fair enough, acts like an Instagram app which uses the engine to show the web app. I knew this was a thing, but since I never really found a good use for it, I didn’t even consider it. Technically it isn’t even far enough from using another Electron app, so might as well. Well then, issue solved! And as a bonus, I still get to say I’m a proud Firefox user and not lose face when talking to other Linux enthusiasts.