A common activity when building a web application is the ‘tweak code -> reload page -> view page source’ cycle. Obviously this gets a bit time consuming and boring after a while. Under Firefox you can use tools like firebug to dynamically inspect and alter the source for your web page, but it adds quite a bit of overhead to the load times of web pages.

Googles chromium (the open source, ubuntu incarnation of their Chrome web browser) is a nice addition to the browser line up on Linux. You can easily add it by dropping a couple of lines into your /etc/apt/sources.list. Visit the Ubuntu Chromium PPA for details.

One of the features I love about chromium is its view-source url prefix e.g.:


view-source:http://yourhost/somepage/?page=4


The above is displayed in the url bar of chromium when viewing the source of a page. The great part is for example above where I am working with a django paginated dataset, I can simply change the url and press enter e.g.:


view-source:http://yourhost/somepage/?page=5


When I do that the source is immediately fetched for the next page and loaded into the page source view. No need to wait for the page to render out and then switch to source view.

Chromium is great to try out and use for cross browser testing. Its very stable in my experience, but note that it has no flash support at this stage.