Enable Backspace in Chromium
Since I discovered that Google doesn’t add the backspace support to its Chrome browser to navigate between web pages history, I always tried to find a way to add this shortcut key support to Chromium. I don’t like to press two or more keys combo (in this case, alt + left) just to go back one page, especially in the low-light condition when I cannot clearly see the keyboard.
Finally, with the help of an Ubuntu forum I found a Chrome extension called Backspace As Back/Forward for Linux. Once you installed this extension, the backspace key icon (
) would appear at the end of the URL address bar along with other extensions when the web pages history is available. Note that you need to refresh the existing opened web pages in order to activate the extension.
The only disadvantage I’ve found with this extension is that the page needs to be fully loaded in order to activate the backspace key. I think this is the nature of Chrome extension since the Chrome extensions are JavaScript / AJAX based.
More Than One Month Usage of Chromium
I used Google Chrome on Ubuntu 9.10 and switched to Chromium on Ubuntu 10.04. Apart from being open source, I can’t tell any difference between Google Chrome and Chromium. During the switch process from Firefox to Chromium in the web development environment, I didn’t have any problems since I mostly used server-side script languages. Recently I have been interested in MooTools JavaScript Framework and followed its guide to test the code in Chromium. All went well until I test the class code. It seems that Chromium does not support document.write() JavaScript function very well. It worked in Firefox after my test with Chromium failed. I’m not familiar with Chromium’s JavaScript engine, but in my experience, Chrome has similar problem since the early build of Chrome 1. Long time ago, I used Chrome 1 alpha as my default web development environment in Windows. It disappointed me that Chrome didn’t have a complete JavaScript engine yet. It is ashamed that Google still has little bit of problems with its browser’s JavaScript engine as the market share of Chrome continues to go up. As a user, my overall usage experience of Chromium is good. However, Chromium doesn’t suited for my web development yet.