Why I dumped Debian Squeeze's Chromium for the Chrome browser from Google's repository

I've always been an advocate for using the packages supplied by the distribution/project you happen to be running as an OS. Rarely do I go outside the "official" repositories for something shinier and newer. That's changing, and swapping the Chromium browser in Debian Squeeze for the Google Chrome browser directly from Google is my latest shift in this direction.

Why did I do it? Well, I've had more than a few incompatibility problems with the Version 6.0.472.63 of Chromium that is in the Debian Squeeze repositories, which won't be updated for anything but bug fixes for the life of Debian's stable release.

Chromium is still super fast, just like Chrome. But now with Google Chrome 11.0.696.68, all the trouble I've been having with complicated web forms has vanished.

And since Chrome/Chromium is pretty much a moving target development-wise, I'm not worried about the browser suddenly "breaking" on me, especially if the version shipping with Squeeze is old enough to be somewhat broken already.

The only problem with the Google package is that Chrome didn't automatically get into the "Internet" section of the GNOME menu. Instead, it's buried deep within the "Debian" menu. Since I wanted to launch it from the upper panel, I just dropped the icon right there, and load it that way every time. That's a small "fail," that is more than made up by the fact that v.11.x works so much better than v.6.x.

Note: I realize that I could find a more up-to-date source of Chromium, but while I'm not 100 percent comfortable with Google's handling of the data they receive via Chrome and other products, I'm willing to accept that for the moment (but reserve the right to change my mind at any time).

I've come to see the wisdom of a stable operating-system base -- such as Debian Squeeze, the Ubuntu LTS, Slackware, or anything that works well in your particular situation -- combined with newer (or even "rolling") versions of key applications such as web browsers, still-alpha-quality video editors, or other fast-developing software that doesn't benefit so much from standing completely still.

Hence I've used the Debian Mozilla team APT archive for newer versions of Firefox/Iceweasel and Thunderbird/Icedove, Liquorix for newer kernels (though now that new kernels are moving through Debian Backports, I should give them a try), and Dropbox.

I have all of these accounted for in separate .list files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, which means that if/when the packages are updated by their respective maintainers, they will flow into my Squeeze box at those intervals.

But there are pitfalls. There's something to be said for sticking with what Debian brought, but any longtime user of Linux/BSD knows that there are packages that become "problematic" in a particular release and are either slightly or completely broken. However, today I'm trying to at the Mozilla Debian team's site, and it appears to be offline. Maybe I need to go straight to Mozilla and try their packages?

I haven't made the leap from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, from OpenShot 1.1.x to 1.3.x, or even for a newer gPodder. If (and as) I stick with Debian Squeeze, all of this will be on the table. Having the latest Mozilla and Google web browsers, a kernel that works with my hardware (I stalled at 2.6.37) and Dropbox, with the rest of Debian Squeeze chugging along nicely, is keeping me quite happy for the time being.