2.4 Browsers and Search Engines

Hey, welcome back to Linux for Web Design. Here we are in elementary OS. This is a pretty fresh install, haven't got much on here. So, this is gonna be a perfect platform to show you how to go about installing some of the tools that you can use for web design on Linux. So, we're gonna start with the bread and butter for any web designer and that is, of course, browsers. We're going to cover the browsers that you're gonna need for testing purposes, and then we're also going to cover some alternative browsers you're going to use just for your own purposes so that if you're getting into Linux because you want to enhance your privacy, then you have these options there. And then while we are on the topic of privacy, we're also gonna look at a couple of alternative search engines that you can integrate with these browsers that also have enhanced privacy. All right we're going to start out by installing Firefox. On most Linux distributions you will probably find Firefox is installed by default anyway. But in case it's not, I'm gonna show you how to install it. So pretty much every distro that is one of these more popular distributions that we've talked about is gonna have some type of software center or app store or some other kind of visual interface to allow you to browse whatever's in their official repositories. In the case of elementary, it's the app center here, which is always pinned on the dock when you first install it. So, gonna open that up, and now I can just search for Firefox. So there's Firefox right there and all I need to do is install it. You're always asked for a password when you are installing software on Linux. So in Ubuntu you're gonna have a software center, in Mint you'll have a software center. I haven't worked a lot with Fedora or Opensuse. But there will be tools in there as well for you to install from there central software repositories. And then if you're on an arch-based system you'd be able to use either an application called Octopi, or one called Pamac, which will allow you to browse the official repositories as well. All right, so now that's just been pulled in, that's ready to go. So now if we open up our applications launcher here is our Firefox browser And just as an interesting side note, once Chrome came out, I kind of put Firefox aside because I found that it was a little sluggish compared to Chrome on Windows and on Mac. But on Linux, Firefox runs super smooth and super fast for me. It's been a whole new experience of Firefox working with it on Linux. And as well as just needing it for testing purposes I actually feel like these days it's probably the best option that you have for development because it has excellent developer tools and builds. So for example we have CSS Grid is coming up and as far as I'm aware right now only Firefox has a CSS Grid inspector. It also has a really good CSS animation inspector. So it's made for development. This is at the top of the heap right now and also, the reason that you'll always find Firefox inside the central repository is for any Linux distribution is that it's an open source project. It's built by Mozilla and not for profit and it's also known for being privacy respecting. So that's it. That's all in takes to install Firefox. So now, let's have a look at some others. Next up, pretty much every web designer needs to have Chrome on their system for testing, as well. However, you will not find Chrome in Linux repositories because it's a closed source browser. So, in order to install Chrome, what we need to do is head to the Chrome download page. We hit this button and then you can see here. This is what I was talking about before where I was suggesting that you choose an IPM or a Debian based system. Because, for example here with Chrome, we have the option to download a deb or a .ipm. So we're just gonna download that deb file. And we're just gonna wait for that to come in for a second. And then we're gonna open the container. Containing folder. And now there is our deb file that we can use to install. Now elementary OS is a little different from other Debian-based systems. It's the only Debian-based system I've used so far that doesn't have tools out of the box for installing deb files. So if you're on Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux, Mint, you'll just be able to double-click this file right now and it will install for you. On elementary, we need to install an extra tool called Eddy, which is this one here. So I'm just gonna install that. So, that's ready to go, and so now we can run this dev file that will open up Eddy, and now Eddy can handle the installation for us. So I'll click Install, authenticate Now that's done, so we should be able to search for Chrome using Albert and there's our Chrome. So really these are the main two, as you already know. There's our Firefox, there's our Chrome. There are also a couple of alternatives to these browsers that are based on these browsers. So you have Firefox, the main project. However, if you're really, really serious about Libre software then there's also another application called IceCat. And IceCat is based on Firefox but it has some extra things in there to prevent tracking, to block any non-free software and things along those lines. So if you really, really serious about free software, Libre software then you might like to check out GNU IceCat. Now as for alternatives to Chrome what you will find in the central repository is for Mististero's is Chromium It's gonna search for Chromium and there we have Chromium here. So Chrome is based off the open source project Chromium. Cramium is virtually identical to Chrome, the only difference is Chrome has some closed source stuff in it while Cramium is completely open source. For me, I was use Chrome proper when I need to do some testing in it. But for personal use, I use Chromium because it's functionally the same. But it's not as tightly integrated with Google services. If that's something that you sort of prefer to steer away from. So I do want my browsing and most of my development in Firefox. But there are a couple of excellent web applications that you need to run in Chrome. So what I need to do with that I use Chromium. That's installed, let's have a quick look. So there you go, side by side you really can't tell the difference between Chromium and Chrome. And that's because effectively there really is no difference. As an end user I've never found myself wanting for something that's included in Chrome but not in Chromium. Now there's one more browser alternative that I wanna point out for you, and that is the Iridium browser. And you can read about that at iridiumbrowser.de. This is another browser that's based on Chromium, but this one is very, very focused on privacy and security. Now this is a browser that's in development. So you might find that you have a little glitchiness with it compared to Chromium, but it's a very cool browser, very interesting browser, I know I'm gonna be keeping an eye out and I think it's definitely worth checking out. If you need to test IE, Microsoft actually provides some free images that you can use on a virtual machine, so if you install Virtual Box, then you can come to this page here, I'll include the link below this video and you can select what version of Internet Explore, or Edge you want to test. Then you can choose your virtual machine, so virtual box for example. And then you're provided with an image. You can spin up on your virtual machine whenever you need to test Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, if you need to test Safari there isn't anything like this you can't install Safari on Linux and it won't provide any type of virtual machine or anything like that. So the only way you can really work with testing on Safari if you're not using a MAC is to use a service like browser like sample for example. Right, and then to wrap things up we're just going to look at a couple of privacy respecting search engines. So you know, if you're picking your browser for your own person use because of privacy concerns, then you might wanna choose a browser to go a long with that. So for example, if you install the Iridium browser, then the default search engine in that is called, quant. So, I'm just gonna search for web design in here so I can show you how it comes up. It's a pretty cool search engine and they make a specific point of letting you know that they don't track anything that you do. The only downside to it is, that I've noticed at least from Australia, it runs a little slow. However, if you are closer to friends, where I assume they probably have this service, then that might not be a problem for you. And then the other search engine, that you might like to consider is DuckDuckGo, so if we open up our Firefox settings here, go to the search page, we can choose DuckDuckGo. Now just do a quick search to show it to you, DuckDuckGo is arguably the strongest alternative search engine at the moment. And it also prides itself on not tracking any of your search engine activity. So it's super easy to set as your default search in Firefox. And then even though nothing is perfect you've got yourself a setup that is a lot more private than you might have been working with before. All right, so that's all the browsers and search engines that I wanted to take you through installing and setting up on Linux. Now we're gonna start moving into design and coding related software. Before we actually get into showing you this software. In the next video, I'm just gonna touch on a little bit of underlying reasoning behind the selection of software that we're gonna be going through. So it's gonna be the next video. A very quick one. I'll see you there.