Chrome May Replace Firefox in Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth, space tourist and founder of Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution spoke with Network World, recently and said that Ubuntu Linux has been using Firefox as the default browser for a very long time and that's about to change. Shuttleworth mentioned that they nearly decided to replace Mozilla’s Firefox browser with the newer and popular Google Chrome browser in one of the last updates.

Firefox faces stiff competition from Google's Chrome browser

The latest stable version of Ubuntu, 11.04 runs Firefox and the upcoming 11.10 build is said to use the same. He did mention that the move to Google Chrome may happen in the 12.04 version, which is slated to be out in April next year. This was also due to the fact that Chrome may not quite be ready for a long-term support build yet. Shuttleworth said that he was impressed by the concept of Chrome OS and also that the Chrome browser had a good future on Linux. Ubuntu has also undergone major changes in the past. The last 11.04 version brought along the Unity interface. This means going away from the default user interfaces that Gnome and KDE come with. Gnome and KDE have been used extensively by all kinds of *nix based operating systems in the past.