Google Chrome

Why I left my new MacBook for a $250 Chromebook

“Why I left my new MacBook for a $250 Chromebook” is a nice write up of a new Chromebook user. Even though I don’t own a MacBook (or any Mac products for that matter), I have been considering a Chromebook for a while now too.

My biggest concern is obviously programming and system administration tools – editors, terminals, remote access, etc. But it’s getting there.

Apart from the experiences and wishlists, I found these two links useful:

SnoozeTab, which I just installed and will keep an eye on for the next few days.
10 best Chromebooks 2016: top Chromebooks reviewed, which I will use as my shopping guide.

Chrome apps … mind blown!

Don’t ask me how, but I’ve ended up in the Google Chrome Web Store, where I spent the last three hours – especially in the Productivity -> Developer Tools category. I knew, there were plenty of apps to make Chrome OS / Chrome Browser super awesome, but it seems it’s been a while since I looked in there … My mind is officially blown!

I don’t need much from my Fedora laptop – a browser, a terminal, and some instant messaging apps. But these days apparently that’s too much. A lot of the things I do through the regular day can be handled right from the browser apps.

Here are some examples.

Text editors. There is a slew of them! Simple and complex, specialized and generic, fast and … not so much. Have a look at Caret for example. It’s Sublime-like editor, based on the Ace editing component. It offers a selection of themes, syntax highlighting for all the major languages, multiple tabs, project settings, and more!
SSH client. Yup, that’s right. You can connect to your remote servers right out of the browser, using, for example, ServerAuditor.
MySQL clients. Choose between a simple command-line one, like MySQL Console. Or a full-featured one, with ERDs and database browser, like Chrome MySQL Admin.
Git, GitHub, and Gist tools. Which there is a variety of…
Web server (yes, really, a web server running in the web browser!) – Web Server fro Chrome, debugger (Xdebug), and compiler (Compiler.work).

Most of these offer session saving, networking synchronization, Google Drive data saving, social network integration, etc.

Wow! The browser world has come a long way since Netscape 3 …

Good bye Google Chrome, hello Chromium

Google dropped the support of its Google Chrome browser on 32-bit Linux operating systems. This is very unfortunate, but not deadly. This change doesn’t affect the Chromium browser – the Open Source project behind Google Chrome.

The two are very compatible. In fact, if you use the Google Sync in Google Chrome to synchronize your passwords, bookmarks, settings, etc. to Google, then Chromium will just pick them all up from there, once you login. All your extensions will get installed and will continue working as well.

Here’s a link for those Fedora users who want to perform a manual installation. Using dnf is probably easier:

dnf copr enable spot/chromium
dnf install chromium

Hopefully, 32-bit Linux Chromium will survive much longer…

Update: Here is how to bring back Flash plugin, for those who need it:

wget http://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora/russianfedora/russianfedora/nonfree/fedora/updates/23/i386/chromium-pepper-flash-20.0.0.306-1.fc23.R.i686.rpm
file-roller --extract-here ./chromium-pepper-flash-20.0.0.306-1.fc23.R.i686.rpm
mv usr/lib/chromium/PepperFlash /usr/lib/chromium-browser/

Restart chrome after that and verify that you have the Adobe Flash Plugin on the about:plugins page.

Chrome DevTools : Remote Debugging Devices

Remote debugging on Android with Chrome DevTools sounds like the best thing since sliced bread for anybody involved in web development. TL;DR version:

There’s no substitute for debugging your site on a real device. Debug browser tabs on your device from your development workspace using remote debugging.

You don’t have to shift attention between your device and development screens. Use screencasting to display your device’s screen along side your developer tools.