Chrome On the Way For Mac and Linux 308
TornCityVenz writes "I've seen many complaints in the feedback on Slashdot every time an article on Google's Chrome browser hits; the calls for true cross platform availability have struck me as a valid complaint. So now it seems Google is answering your calls, promising in this article on CNET a deadline for Mac and Linux support." I'd really like to not care about the name of the browser I'm using, but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.
Firefox extension? (Score:5, Insightful)
but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.
Unless I am grossly misinformed, I do not see how Firefox extensions could work at all on Chrome, let alone 'seamlessly'. A statement such as this essentially says "I will only use exactly what I have now"
FireFox extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, Timothy: it's doubtful you'll see out of the box compatibility with AdBlock for Chrome.
Why would a technology company that generates revenue from ads want to allow you to block the ads?
Slashdot's pretty greedy these days; there's ads in my RSS feed from Slashdot.
I ignore them.
Mental cost of switching (Score:4, Insightful)
Why bother on the Mac? (Score:3, Insightful)
We already have a pretty decent, well supported Webkit powered browser with a reasonable userbase. I'm not really seeing google bringing anything new to the party.
Re:Firefox extension? (Score:3, Insightful)
I read it differently.
I thought it pictures quite well the fact that Chrome will have a huge way to go against firefox if they cannot take some of firefoxes most popular extensions features and offer them in chrome.
I wanna be able to firebug, addblock and a host of other stuff that, if not available in chrome while most of google works fine with ff, then its useless to me.
The real trouble will be spelled out next year, when google decides that this or that feature of their cloud will be chrome only.
We will be damning google for ages after that. But mark my words:
I foresaw it in my noodles.
Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't understand why it is taking Google so long to release a Mac and Linux version.
Well, according to this [theregister.co.uk] they used Windows' own HTTP protocol implementation for the first version - they've now written their own.
I suspect that Google are less concerned about taking marketshare from Safari (Mac) and Firefox (linux) than they are about getting established on Windows. Methinks their priority is to ensure that there is a Google-branded alternative to IE they can use as a web app platform just in case Microsoft does something to break Google Docs on IE (inadvertantly of course - no company with Microsoft's reputation would stoop to telling their developers that "IE9 ain't done until Gmail won't run"...)
Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score:3, Insightful)
GUI programming and inter-process communication are vastly different on Windows than Linux/Mac; a lot of their code for Chrome was to make the existing code (WebKit) work with this design, but a lot of the rest was code that has to be completely rewritten - and chances are, a lot of the code that they wrote that they can keep needs to be updated to work on more than just Windows as well.
Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score:3, Insightful)
No two operating systems are exactly the same, from the programmer's perspective. The available operating system interfaces for everything from file access to network interface control can be very different. Not just the names of library functions, but how the needed functionality is divided into operations. It turns out that the major division in widely used desktop OSes right now is between Windows (does everything its own way) and everyone else (does everything the UNIX way). It's not to say there aren't many consequential and subtle differences between UNIX variants (among which are Linux, OSX, and the many BSDs), but if you make it your first priority to support the most widely used OS, Windows, then it could be a while before you get around to Linux and OSX. Whereas if you made one of the UNIX-like OSes your first priority, the rest of those would probably follow more quickly than the Windows version.
I don't have any firsthand knowledge of how Google develops software, but in general terms this is why you might not get the Windows version and the OSX/Linux versions all at the same time.
Re:FireFox extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason to block ads for most people is because they are distracting.
The reason that I block ads, aside from being ugly and distracting from content, or from being intrusive, is because 99% of the time when a page is insanely slow to load, it's because it's waiting on some Javascript or image from the ad server, which is apparently overloaded.
Most of the time when I try to load a page and it won't load, it's an indicator that ad blocking is off. I also block Google Analytics and Digg badges as well.
I don't, and I suspect most people don't, ever block text based ads. I've no problem with them. Thus Google's ads get through. Google understands that text based ads do not bug most people, hence it's always been their ideology to use them.
'Most people' (that use ads) use predefined ad lists, which include Google ads. Unless a covenant was reached to remove Google from those lists, they'd stay there; the only other option would be for Google to make its own adblock list without its own ads and ship that to the browser.
Though imagine if a company that was the biggest ad provider on the internet released software that let users browse the internet with only their own ads. I can see some people getting pissed off about that.
Re:FireFox extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
With newer filter-sets, people no longer block anything that annoys them - they just block the whole lot.
Re:FireFox extensions (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there actually a precedent for successful legal action over stuff like that? Have advertisers sued VCR manufacturers, Tivo, etc? What about the old adware junk that would look at ads and let users see competing offers? I know advertisers complained, but did anything ever come of it? I don't think there's a specific law against it, and there aren't contracts between any of the parties involved.
extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake me when they have NoScript, AdBlock+/ElementHiderHelper, Repagination, ChickenFoot, FoxyProxy, RefControl, etc...
Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Google is a better strategist than you are giving them credit to. Google doesn't give a shit whether there is Chrome on Mac or Linux, because those platforms are covered by Firefox and other non-Explorer browsers, and Google is fine with that. Google even sponsors Firefox, by the tune of millions of dollars.
Google has one goal in mind: increase the non-IE marketshare. IE only exists on Windows, hence Chrome only needs to be able to fight on that platform.
Now, if you don't even understand why Google needs to increase the non-IE marketshare, I can't help you.
Re:Why bother on the Mac? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's benefit to having broad OS availability. Safari is available on OS X and Windows but not Linux. Safari is also pretty closed as far as plug-ins are concerned. So is Chrome, at the moment, but they're working to rectify that. If Safari ran on Linux and had an open platform for add-ons, I'd be more inclined to agree with you that there's no need for Chrome.
Presumably Google's other motivation is to provide a run-time environment for future web-based applications they might release. If they own the browser on which these applications will run, they can more easily remedy any bugs or performance concerns that crop up instead of having to wait for a third-party to take care of them.
No strategic interest in Linux and Mac (Score:3, Insightful)
Google doesn't have a strategic interest for Chrome on Linux or Mac, as there IE is nonexistent. Chrome was created specifically to fight against IE. And IE exists on Windows only.
So far, Google's tactical move has worked, by chipping almost 1 percent of marketshare from IE. Firefox users aren't going to switch to Chrome (in general) but some IE users will.
Re:If only... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Google projects are usually side-projects that the developers work on with part of their time as a 'fun' project.
The developer that chose to do this was probably just having fun and didn't really expect it to be picked as one of the ideas that gets launched to users. So he did it however he wanted.
Now that it's a big project, it's being fixed.
Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were Google (that is a great sentence) I would base it on QT 4. Fast, customizable, cross-platform, modern and integrated with WebKit.
Re:Market Share (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm betting good money that this is very hard to do properly cross-platform.
Re:Enough already... (Score:2, Insightful)
Replaced with what? Silverlight?
Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
Until their machine comes with Chrome bundled as the default browser - that's the end game Google are aiming for here.
Then you'll see IE user-share decline rapidly.
Re:FireFox extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
Please don't use Filterset.G. There are far better options out there.
http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project#filterset.g [adblockplus.org]
only IM, no video, no voice (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Intel-only on the Mac, please (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I know I'm hopelessly behind the times with my *ancient* G4 mini, but if there's a group that needs a faster browser, it's us "obsolete computer users". Obsolete meaning the computer, not the user.
I know that x86 is the way forward, but I see more and more Intel-only apps that make me wonder what exactly prohibited the devs from making it a Universal Binary.
Microsofts Live Mesh comes to mind (I wanted to install it to compare it to Dropbox); not even a decent message stating that it was Intel-only, it just said that my device wasn't supported or something. Dropbox on Linux/PPC is another culprit, btw.
I'm hoping V8 gets ported to PPC as well, although I'm somewhat worried that it won't, since a JS interpreter sounds a bit more involved than a file syncing thingy.
Re:A firm date from Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
They have a goal to sell their online Office suite and other apps and services, almost all of which are accessed via the browser. What would happen if the next version of I.E. broke some of their apps? They can't afford to be at anybody's mercy.
Re:Firefox extension? (Score:2, Insightful)
> I wanna be able to firebug, addblock and a host of other stuff that, if not available in chrome while most of google works fine with ff, then its useless to me.
The WebKit team has an equivalent (in some ways better, in some ways inferior â" I prefer it overall) to firebug built into the browser. I don't know if Google intends to pull some of that open source code over to Chrome, but I don't see why not since they already have a fairly advanced task management window.
I can't see Google doing an adblock feature, it would probably trigger a class-action lawsuit, but *every* browser has some kind of built in or third party adblock solution, so it's only a matter of time â"Âhow long depends on how many people are using chrome.
> I thought it pictures quite well the fact that Chrome will have a huge way to go against firefox if they cannot take some of firefoxes most popular extensions features and offer them in chrome.
I agree with you that google doesn't seem to care as much about extensions as the mozilla team, but do they need to? Why should google make another firefox? Better to put their own development muscle behind firefox.
I see Chrome as a stable, secure and simple browser (like IE and Safari) that is suitable to be pre-installed by PC manufacturers, Linux distros, schools and so on. For that, Chrome is looking very promising.
Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If only... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's XMPP with custom extensions to support voice, and possibly other features as well. From the horse's mouth [google.com]:
Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
They wrote a Windows wrapper around cross platform libraries.
No, you've inverted it, they wrote a "cross platform layer" that currently only has a Windows libraries based implementation:
Chrome uses abstraction libraries to draw the GUI on other non-Windows platforms, but for now, what sits underneath part of ChromeViews is good ol' WTL.
(from Scott Hanselman's analysis of the Chrome code [hanselman.com])
This indicates that Google did have multiplatform support in mind from the beginning. If they hadn't used native Windows libs for the GUI, I'm pretty certain we'd be hearing just as much bitching about how cross platform libs never perform as solidly as native ones.
Then they had the nerve to deny it, even when anybody who looked at the source code immediately after initial release could see the truth of the matter.
Citation, please.
Re:What's the rush? (Score:5, Insightful)
ah, but my 15 extensions worth of bloat is quite different to yours (except for noscript and addblock, probably). Since we both just get the features we want, is it rely bloat, which tends to be defined as extraneous and vaguely useful features that have been hanging around for a while.
Re:A firm date from Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because you use the "beta" version of their software doesn't mean that there's not a release available -- it just doesn't have the same features. Google does have paid for services in addition to the free ones, or didn't you know that?