[NCLUG] [OT?] Vimium on Chromium on FreeBSD

[Chad Perrin]

On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 04:39:33PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> 
> > 5. Sadly, Vimium still is not working perfectly here.  It installs, but has
> > some annoying quirks.
> 
> I use Vimium with Chromium.  It was the extension that made Chromium
> usable to me since it provides keys for page navigation.  That plus
> setting gtk-key-theme-name to "Emacs" makes it bearable.  In Firefox I
> use the Firemacs plugin and can't live without it.  I have been
> looking for a Firemax equivalent for Chromium but so far none exist
> that I know about.  But Vimium is great for improving Chromium in
> similar ways and helps this Emacs user out quite a bit.

YakShave was actually created by someone who uses Viper Mode in Emacs,
apparently, and is meant to suit his preferences.  Unfortunately, it does
not appear to have any facility for selecting links the same way
Vimperator and Vimium do, making it kind of pointless as far as I can
tell.


> 
> But Chromium has annoying quirks...
> 
> For example, Vimium allows you to specify keys for navigation.  That
> is awesome.  But those customizations only work on normal external web
> pages.  They do not work on Chromium's internal pages such as the
> about:plugins (any about:* page) or "New Tab" pages or gallery pages
> or others.  This affects all plugins such as Vimium and "Navigate on
> paste".  This means that it is impossible to have a consistently
> customized user interface across the entire GUI.  I find myself doing
> strange things such as C-t (open new tab), then TAB-Enter to select a
> normal page to get back to where customizations work again and then
> pasting in URLs (so the Navigate on paste plugin works).  And there I
> am navigating away using keys and then suddenly they go dead when I
> find myself on an internal page.  Bah!

Yeah, that's one of the quirks I ran into early: that the only URL
schemes it supports are http://, https://, file://, and ftp://.  That
means that chrome: and about: absolutely will not work.  What confuses me
more, though, is the fact that Vimium will not work on the Chrome
extensions gallery either -- even though it uses a normal hypertext URL
scheme.


> 
> Vimium is a great extension for Chromium.  But like all extensions it
> is limited by what Chromium allows it to do.  Chromium is really
> annoying when crossing over those rough edges.

Yeah, limitations in the extension system seem to be the biggest problem
with Chromium.  Similarly, while the EFF/Tor extension for Firefox called
HTTPS Everywhere will operate securely, the Chromium equivalent called KB
SSL will only redirect after the initial request has been sent, which
means that stuff like cookie-stored login data will be sent in the clear
before it redirects from HTTP to HTTPS.

Some of these limitations strike me as misguided attempts at offering
improved security.  For instance, unregulated access to chrome: URL
schemes would mean that a malicious or buggy extension could actually
affect the page used to manage extensions, potentially eliminating the
ability to uninstall or disable it (or worse).  Another example is the
fact that redirection of the initial request, necessary for the secure
operation of an HTTPS redirection extension, might be regarded as a
potential vulnerability in the extension system in the case of a phishing
extension.

There must be ways to protect against such problems while still allowing
an extension to perform secure redirection and a consistent user
experience, though.  Considering the great work Google has done on the UI
for Chrom[e|ium], I'd expect the cardinal sin of an inconsistent user
experience as produced by inconsistent keybindings within a single
application to rate pretty highly on the "to be fixed" priority list.

Then again, maybe Google's like Apple in that the latter only considers
its own UI ideas to be worth facilitating.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.nclug.org/pipermail/nclug/attachments/20101104/eba302c9/attachment.pgp>