Chrome clone that isn't made of Chrome?

July 10, 2009 6:35 AM

Are there any browsers that are essentially Chrome clones in function and appearance, but aren't Chrome and don't share any common code?

I really like it and find it easy to use, but it kills my computer when I use it (we're talking forcing hard reboots, etc.). So does firefox, incidentally (but less often for some reason).

I tried Iron, but it is the same code, just with the 'send data to google' removed.

posted by doublehappy to computers & internet (16 comments total)

Safari, rendering wise.
posted by tjenks at 6:36 AM on July 10 [1 favorite has favorites]

Take a look at Arora. Built using Qt, and utilizing the WebKit rendering engine. It's now where near feature complete... but it is light and fast.

The best thing about it... it runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, and Windows. Currently, x86 only.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 6:49 AM on July 10

Not really, theres only so many serious browsers out there: IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Not to mention all the weirdo IE shells.

If youre having problems with both Chrome and Firefox then the problem is your computer, not the browsers. Bad ram, bad disk, bad network card, etc. You should be looking into that.
posted by damn dirty ape at 6:51 AM on July 10 [2 favorites has favorites]

Safari is not only similar rendering wise. Version 4 features a Top Sites homepage just like Chrome. The betas also had tabs-on-top, but that was removed for the stable release, because it violated Apple's human interface guidelines.
posted by espire at 6:51 AM on July 10

...Regarding the hard reboots... sounds like bad RAM. Test with MemTest86 or MemTest86+. RAM is usually easy to replace. And just for good measure... chk that dsk... or just fsck it all
posted by PROD_TPSL at 7:02 AM on July 10

Brand new laptop, worked beautifully until I installed Chrome. I realise Chrome isn't necessarily the root cause of the problems, but I have uninstalled, and removed all trace of googleupdate.exe and the crashes are now a couple times a day instead of three or four minutes after boot.

chkdsk found no problems. memtest86 found no problems. nothing finds any problems. and, annoyingly, my mouse still moves, and everything sort of responds for a little bit after the initial freeze.

The best thing is my recovery disks (of which I made three copies) don't work, and PCs no longer ship with Vista disks, so I'm screwed.

Trying Arora now :) it's simple and does the job. Could be a goer. Just wish I could get rid of the tab bar. I hate tabs.
posted by doublehappy at 7:21 AM on July 10

I've been sporadically playing around with Arora on my netbook (running Xubuntu) and it looks very promising. Nice and clean and incredibly fast. It is (currently) missing a lot of features that more robust browsers have, but I'm keen to see how the project grows.
posted by kryptondog at 7:22 AM on July 10

Are there any specific features you are particularly fond of? If you like both Chrome and Firefox I think you should give Opera a try.

But as others have mentioned, it is possible that your crashing problems don't lie within the application, but perhaps at an OS or hardware level.
posted by bjrn at 7:22 AM on July 10

I'm using Opera right now, and it's okay, but the ui isn't polished. I've been trying to get the Personal Bar below the Address Bar but can't seem to do it. Don't like tabs at all, so it's tough for me to use new browsers, because they're pretty much hard-wired now :(
posted by doublehappy at 7:26 AM on July 10

Safari and Chrome do share common code, as both are built on WebKit (Apple's fork of KHTML which has become preferred over Gecko for nearly every new browser project).
posted by yesno at 7:26 AM on July 10

Brand new laptop, worked beautifully until I installed Chrome. I realise Chrome isn't necessarily the root cause of the problems, but I have uninstalled, and removed all trace of googleupdate.exe and the crashes are now a couple times a day instead of three or four minutes after boot.

Speak to your manufacturer. That your machine started misbehaving immediately after you installed Chrome is likely a coincidence and not Chrome's or Firefox's fault. Your machine should still be in warranty. Your laptop's maker may be able to fix whatever hardware problem you have.
posted by I_pity_the_fool at 7:29 AM on July 10

I've never had a problem with Chrome, but just tried to download Arora and use it and could not connect to any web sites with it.
posted by dfriedman at 7:34 AM on July 10

Speak to your manufacturer. That your machine started misbehaving immediately after you installed Chrome is likely a coincidence and not Chrome's or Firefox's fault. Your machine should still be in warranty. Your laptop's maker may be able to fix whatever hardware problem you have.

Seriously, this. Then once you've got a computer that works, use Chrome or whatever browser you like.
posted by tapeguy at 7:41 AM on July 10

IE8. Seriously.

If I wasn't busy, I'd make a screenshot with the two of them looking nearly identical. And IE8's now nearly as fast.
posted by General Malaise at 7:44 AM on July 10

Right now I can't afford to be without a computer for more than a few hours - got some projects to finish and new ones to start, so I just need a band-aid for now :) IE8 is actually not bad. The speed's not a big issue for me - I usually have 10-50 browser windows open at any one time, so as long as the content is there eventually, I won't notice the speed.
posted by doublehappy at 7:52 AM on July 10

10-50 browser windows open at any one time

Rather than changing browsers, you might consider downloading the pages you're working with and using them offline. Depending on the content of the pages, 50 websites open at a time would drive my happy stable computer to a glitchy death. In paticular, the Ajaxy disaster of facebook really grinds my system to a halt when I have too many tabs open. YMMV
posted by JimmyJames at 8:32 AM on July 10