Poor Franz Ferdinand.  I’ll bet he’s rolling in his grave.  He should Black (back)Hand that band.

Now, I’ve used Chrome in Linux before, and a few things about Firefox kept me hooked.  Today, though, I was on a mission to change all that.  I wanted basically all the functionality I got from Firefox in my Chrome experience as well.  This article should help others do the same.

Tip: Flash is enabled in newer versions by default, but in old Chrome for Linux versions, you had to start it with –enable-plugins.  I’m using native x86_64 flash for Ubuntu 9.04, and it works brilliantly.  Get it here.

Result

The first thing I did was import all my Firefox settings, which Chrome asks when it starts the first time.  This worked extremely well, even pulling over my bookmarks toolbar.  This is the result of my work:

Tip: To get the bookmark toolbar to show, hit Ctrl-b.

Another Tip: You can remove all the title text from bookmarks to get the bare icons I did above.  It’s actually pretty clean when you have favicons to depend on.

Goal 1: Stumbleupon

Yes, I waste tons of time stumbling.  According to my stats, I’ve given 4,854 pages a Thumbs Up, 447 pages a Thumbs Down, and I’ve hit the Stumble!  button 18,610 times.  This behavior may be unhealthy, but I’m addicted.  The solution to this is the cool toolbar they have.  You can see an example here.  This replaces the Firefox addon toolbar for everything by the initiation of Stumbling, which I made a little bookmark for in my toolbar.

Stumble!

Goal 2:  Instapaper

Instapaper is great for putting those articles in a reading queue that you just don’t feel like reading, and getting them on some mobile device when you’re bored, like on a flight.  It’s easily solved in Chrome with a bookmarklet.  See your account details in Instapaper, since it’s personalized.

Goal 3: Delicious

I love delicious.  It’s seriously helpful, and the delicious addon for Firefox has been on of my reasons for sticking with it for so long.  Yet, I recently found out that a bookmarklet can do all of the functions I use the addon for.  Here it is:

Delicious

Just drag that to your toolbar.

Goal 4: Get rid of that stupid blue theme

Ugh.  That light blue crap reminds me of Windows XP.  Get it away!  Thankfully, Chrome now has themes.  I changed it to the Brushed look, and I like it a lot.

Goal 5: Amazon Universal Wishlist

The Universal Wishlist bookmarklet still works like it did in Firefox.  Awesome.  Get one.

I hope this helps all of you out there with Firefox blues.  Google really has come through on this one.

Goal 6: URL Shortening

I always liked being able to click a button and shorten a URL.  I can get this functionality using PunyURL (the sapo.pt one) using this bookmarklet: Puny

All you have to do is copy the room name into the Join Chat window, and put in groupchat.google.com as the server.  I hope you find it useful.  If anyone knows how to make this a link that GNOME will throw at Pidgin, let me know.  That would be awesome.

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For the record, Brickskeller is a pretty awesome pub. I highly recommend it if you are in the D.C. area.

Hawt. I hope they change all my ads to look like that. Turns out they blogged about it here.