Google Announces Chrome For Mac and Linux Dev Builds 251
Dan Kegel (who admits to being a Chrome developer) writes to point out a post from Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg, Product Managers for Google Chrome, with some good news for non-Windows users who want to play with Chrome: "In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux (for a couple of different Linux distributions), but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software." (The announcement continues below.)
"How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won't yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.Meanwhile, we'll get back to trying to get Google Chrome on these platforms stable enough for a beta release as soon as possible ..." The downloads are available through the Chrome developer's channel.
How does this differ? (Score:5, Interesting)
How does this differ from the Chromium daily builds [launchpad.net]? Is it identical only officially a Google product, or are there technical differences?
Re:It's okay (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry for the extra reply. I forgot to recommend Camino [caminobrowser.org] which uses the Gecko rendering engine but is a real Mac application, and has built-in ad blocking.
Phoning home (Score:3, Interesting)
Does it still send unknown encrypted data back to google at will [foliovision.com]?
Thanks, that's all I need to know about this browser.
Re:Still mad at Google (Score:3, Interesting)
It would have been smarter to use Qt than to have very Windows- and Mac- customized ports, and then you would have got a Linux port for free. You can use QGtkStyle (included in Qt 4.5, but you can run it yourself now) to make Qt apps look like GTK ones.
This seems kind of retarded because Google Gadgets is already GTK and Qt. Obviously they didn't build a GUI abstraction layer then, and reinvented the wheel then (with Qt and GTK+ versions.) So now they will do it all again for Chrome. I guess someone should explain to Google about code and component reuse.
Re:It's okay (Score:3, Interesting)
And why do you think Google is interested in preserving Firefox as an end goal? They are not a non-profit foundation. They are much more like Microsoft or Apple: they want to make money.
One potential way to make money is to control the internet content all the way through end-user delivery. It may enable some things that seem otherwise impossible: delivering protected copyrighted content, for example. If they offered a browser that wouldn't let you save YouTube streams, then maybe the RIAA would let them display music videos. Maybe book publishers would let them display Google Books along a Kindle model. Or maybe Google has a workable micro-payment system in place that depends on the browser not spoofing the for-pay site. Or maybe they just want to make sure that Google AdSense and google-analytics can't be blocked by the end users.
A "non-trustable" browser (like Firefox with all its Greasemonkey scripts and Noscript and AdBlock etc.) can't offer the rights-holders enough assurance that they can deliver their data without it being copied. Chrome may be the guarantee that lets them make money.
Before another DRM flamewar erupts, I'm not saying that Chrome can technically offer any more magic solutions than CSS or copy-protected diskettes or any of a thousand other failed DRM schemes. But like Apple's Fair Play, it might be "enough" protection to convince the copyright holders to distribute their content through Google's tubes.
Re:CPU Usage... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you like the OSX experience enough to stick with it. Why not give Safari 4 beta a try? It comes with better integration into OSX and has most of Chrome's features, with biggest miss being the sandboxing. It also uses the Webkit engine for rendering webpages, which is somewhat faster than Firefox's Gecko.
Linux sandbox progress (Score:3, Interesting)
Several approaches are being investigated; see
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxSandboxing [google.com]
http://lwn.net/Articles/332974/ [lwn.net]
http://www.imperialviolet.org/2008/11/27/sandboxing-on-linux.html [imperialviolet.org]
Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :) (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, bookmarks work pretty well for 50+ new forum threads that didn't exist on your last visit :)
I browse forums by clicking "New posts", then middle-clicking all the interesting threads. Close thread list, read each tab in order. If the wi-fi goes down, I still have lots to read right in front of me.
Re:Speaking of browser innovation... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx (Score:5, Interesting)
And how it doesn't suck then? I'd say that Safari and Chrome are comparable.
Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward. It has real sandboxing of tabs so that one tab can't make the others unresponsive or take down the browser is a huge leap forward. With the Web being so central to most people's workflow these days this is akin to the move to a multitasking OS. I think that's what has most of us excited, not speed or new features at this point. It has a long way to go, but the underlying architectural decisions provide for more potential.
Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx (Score:2, Interesting)
But they aren't... SEPARATED INTO PROCESSES!
Check out Stainless [stainlessapp.com] for Leopard... it's still lacking a few features, but it's coming together quite well.
Re:Still mad at Google (Score:3, Interesting)
For a UI, writing the code just isn't the hard part. The hard part is designing the UI specification so that you know exactly how you want it to behave in every situation. Once you have that, coding to spec is a matter of man hours and testing, but there's nothing fundamentally difficult or uncertain about it. Keep in mind that no one's talking about rewriting the engine for each OS.
For the vast majority of projects, you're entirely right that it makes more sense to take a small performance penalty for the advantage of cross platform code. I think that the web browser is almost unique in this case though, because it gets such heavy use that even a very small performance penalty is significant to many end users. You're being dogmatic, and usually you'd be right, but I think that this is the exception.
Also, people don't expect exactly the same behavior from the UI cross platform; quite the opposite in fact. People expect you to design the UI to integrate well with the desktop environment you're working in, and that means slight differences in appearance and behavior from one system to another.
Looking at some major cross platform projects - GIMP and VLC come to mind, they're excellent programs, but their adoption has not been widespread outside of Linux, and I think it's primarily because their UI doesn't feel natural on other platforms. (well, VLC's interface doesn't even feel natural in Linux, and I personally wouldn't use it if the underlying engine weren't so dramatically superior to the competition, every time I install Ubuntu on a machine I start by trying to use Totem, but eventually run into something that Totem doesn't handle gracefully, that VLC does)
Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx (Score:3, Interesting)
No its not.
Was IE released for WINE? No.
Was Safari released for Windows? Yes.
Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx (Score:4, Interesting)
Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward. It has real sandboxing of tabs so that one tab can't make the others unresponsive or take down the browser is a huge leap forward. With the Web being so central to most people's workflow these days this is akin to the move to a multitasking OS. I think that's what has most of us excited, not speed or new features at this point. It has a long way to go, but the underlying architectural decisions provide for more potential.
I know they advertise this, but it honestly hasn't proven to be true. I've been using Chrome daily since it came out (less bloat than Firefox, less suck than IE), and when a tab freezes, they all freeze.
Re:NOT amd64 (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, they really have managed write an javascript engine that isn't 64-bit clean in 2008.
You do understand that their JavaScript engine is a JIT, right? Which means that it compiles to native code. Which means that the compiler part has to be distinct for every new architecture.
"64-bit clean" doesn't even enter into this - it's not a simple matter of not making silly
assumptions like sizeof(long)==4.