Google Chrome comes to Linux (and other browser comparisons)

Just in time to save my Fedora experience from buggy plugin support and bad font rendering, along comes Google Chrome in its first public beta for Linux. First impression: this browser is so impressive I will probably leave Firefox for it.

I've used Chrome on Windows since the first public betas, and while it has been fast, simple and powerful, I never saw a compelling reason to switch from Firefox, of which I have been a faithful user and proponent since early betas as well. Until I decided to eat my own dog food and switch to Linux (specifically Fedora 12).

A picture is worth 1000 words, so without further ado check out the differences in rendering (click images to see full size). I'll update this post at some point with a full review of Linux browser options.

Google Chrome rendering Blogger

Firefox 3.5 rendering Blogger

Of course, the standard developer tools are present and accounted for:

For the fun of it, I took screenshots of some other Linux browsers. They look a lot like Firefox even though two use different rendering engines. Epiphany (bottom) and perhaps WebKit in general seems to do a little better at subpixel hinting.

Galeon, a good Gecko-based (like Firefox) browser for gnome

Konqueror, a full-featured KDE browser using KHTML

Epiphany, a Webkit-based (like Safari and Chrome) browser