CodeWeavers Package Google Chrome For Linux and Mac 239
jfbilodeau writes "The fine folks at Codeweavers performed an 11 day experiment in getting Google Chrome working on Linux and Mac. Their efforts resulted in the Chromium proof of concept. 'Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be. In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.' Caveat: their implementation is free as in beer but not free as in speech."
Predictable, Really. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's vision isn't truly understood by everyone, IMHO. Google knew that the Open Source community would fork and port Chrome anyway and that freed up time for developers to work out the system bugs and get the thing live. Releasing the source code is a redeemable action from the many gripes that flooded about Google not offering Linux or Mac support in Chrome on launch, among other [arstechnica.com] things.
Now I personally would like to see a fork that would upgrade Chrome to remove any significant Windows reliance. I don't trust Microsoft to put my interests first and therefore I don't like the idea of a browser that relies so heavily on Microsoft for security.
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free as in beer
but not free as in speech
What of free from fear
Of corporate over-reach?
Re:Predictable, Really. (Score:5, Funny)
free as in beer
but not free as in speech
What of free from fear
Of corporate over-reach?
Yeah! Opera gives you corporate reach-around!
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I'm confused... isn't chrome OSS to begin with? How is codeweavers' project closed?
Or am I confusing open licensing with something (sorry) "viral" like gpl?
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My mistake, I should have just looked first. Apparently chromium is under the BSD license.
Re:Predictable, Really. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mac and Linux users should reject Windows applications and games. If they can't, they should question their OS of choice.
Why should anyone restrict themselves to native applications when they don't have to?
Ever heard of the best of both worlds?
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Ever heard of the best of both worlds?
Of course! That's one of my favorite episodes... :-P
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Wow. That is hard. Considering OS X is based off of a BSD platform, and Linux is based on the rebuilding Unix, you would think we of all people would welcome code from other platforms. Windows shares BSD roots with it's TCP/IP stack. All documented in the WIKI's if you don't believe me. I'm all for sharing.
My MacBook Pro dual boots XP in bootcamp & Fusion, and has various *nix builds running in Fusion. I work in OS X and play on XP. Sure is nice that my games don't screw up my work environment.
Re:Predictable, Really. (Score:4, Informative)
Windows shares BSD roots with it's TCP/IP stack.
That used to be true. The Vista one is all new code.
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Aha, but we will always have C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Because Microsoft focuses on application compatibility above all else, and removing hosts would probably break five 10 year old apps.
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Mac and Linux users should reject Windows applications and games. If they can't, they should question their OS of choice.
You're joking right?
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No, I don't joke. If I feel forced to use windows applications and games, I would go with Windows.
Long time before Ubuntu or other kind of stuff, I used Slackware Linux without WINE (it didn't work anyway) or any kind of dual booting as my only OS. Loki Games were alive and kicking that time so I purchased my games from them, running natively on Linux. I used Windows (as my only OS) a while and when I figured Desktop Linux won't serve to my kind of usage that time and only way to get full support is running
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Re:Predictable, Really. (Score:5, Insightful)
free as in beer but not free as in speech
What of free from fear Of corporate over-reach?
I'm getting pretty sick of the whole "drunk as in beer, not as in scotch" disclaimer crap. Everything has its limits, and petty squabbles about "mine is freer than yours" serve only to enrage a flock of wannabe first amendment lawyers. They fill the blog'O'sphere with masturbatory rants about "you published your peanut butter without my chocolate disclaimer!"
Can't we find something better to squabble endlessly about? Like why Firefox's spell checker didn't complain about the word "masturbatory"?
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Mmm, scotch (Score:2)
Mine's a Macallan 12-year-old.
Your annoyance is misplaced. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your annoyance is misplaced.
The speech/beer convention was devised as a patch for a bug in the English language. One word, "free", has two distinct meanings. Normally people deal with these cases by using context ("Some atoms are ionized but most are unionized" vs. "Plumbers in many areas are unionized") but in this case both meanings are plausible. The two types are free are distinct, software could be free in either sense, yet English (unlike most other languages) gives us only one preferred word for both meanings.
This resulted in numerous exceedingly tedious flame wars that ended, if at all, with a lame "Oh, that's not what I thought you meant--why didn't you say so in the first place?"
Clarifying which homonym is intended right up front may annoy you, but trust me, it is far, far better than the alternative.
--MarkusQ
Won't you take me.... to crappytown? (Score:3, Insightful)
Duly impressed in their success in porting in less than two weeks, I downloaded the Mac port. Alas, the joy is short-lived. It's terribly slow, locked up for short periods a couple of times, and had a generally poor user experience. It was not dock-aware, had odd-looking widgets that looked poor compared to Firefox or Safari, and didn't integrate with the OS at all. I suspect that's par for the course for a Wine-ported app, but the end experience is worse than running Chrome in Parallels desktop in Cohe
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Doesn't Wine on the Mac use X? Or does it translate to Cocoa? X apps on a Mac are aweful. Though sometimes handy... such as in the case of managing VMware Server from a Mac workstation by running the Linux admin tool and displaying locally.
Re:Won't you take me.... to crappytown? (Score:5, Interesting)
> I suspect that's par for the course for a Wine-ported app
Wine apps are/can be much better than that on Leopard. I only have one data point, but I use it _extensively_ and it works super-well. And stably. And actually, maybe even better than on Windows.
The app? ies4osx [kronenberg.org] under Darwine. Specifically, I am running Internet Explorer 6.0 for web-dev testing.
The ONLY complaint I have is that it's under the "X" program, instead of it's own program, so I can't cmd-tab to it effectively. Web I'm doing web-dev, I also run Xemacs, so I have to ctrl-tab to get to IE, then cmd-tab to get to Safari and Firefox.
And it's such a small complaint that I haven't even googled for a solution yet.
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Spore for OSX uses Wine as well.
It's a hack! (Score:4, Interesting)
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as good as Wine is, it will never compete with a browser which is designed to run natively on a platform
I don't know that that's true. WINE is not an emulator, it's an implementation of the Windows API. It's certainly possible for it to be a better-performing implementation.
If you were talking about virtualization, or even pseudo-virtualization like VMWare, where I/O is the serious bottleneck, then you'd be right.
I'd definitely like to see the benchmarks you suggest.
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It may not be an emulator, but this thing runs as slow as hell on my Debian system. I'm not sure an emulated version of Windows wouldn't be better... but I don't run such things.
I have seen a few things that probably run faster on WINE than they would on native Windows. This just happens to not be one of them. Picasa is so-so. Not great, but usable. This (Chrome) for me isn't usable as a regular browser, beyond just seeing what it looks like.
I'm glad they did this, because otherwise I'd have to convinc
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it's just really a hack. I mean, as good as Wine is, it will never compete with a browser which is designed to run natively on a platform.
WINE is an implementation of the Windows API. This implementation is native, so you can say that applications are in fact running natively.
Copy and pasted from Wine faq:
4.3. Is Wine slower than just using Windows?
Actually, Wine is sometimes faster. The speed of an application depends on a lot of factors: the available hardware and their drivers, the quality of the code in the APIs the application uses, and the quality of the code in the underlying operating system.
Driver code matters a lot. If you
I would pay (Score:2)
Since I can't code my way out of a wet paper sack I would pay to have some changes made to Google's browser.
1. Use OS widgets/themes/colors. Apps should ALWAYS follow the OS UI!
2. Have a title bar that acts like a title bar.(goes with above)
3. Status bar. I want to see every URL before I click on it.
4. More options for javascript (like turn off 3rd party scripts)
5. Ability to turn off plugins and crap. (I hate flash!)
6. Remove Google crap (google updater, etc)
7. Add the ability to start chrome with last ses
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I assume when you say Chrome is a "privacy killer" you have read the whole source or at least monitored network traffic while browsing. Or maybe you are pulling it all out of your Google-hating er... parts.
Proxy logs (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume when you say Chrome is a "privacy killer" you have read the whole source or at least monitored network traffic while browsing.
Serious defenders of online privacy do exactly the latter by testing software on a honeypot behind a proxy, reading the proxy's log, and reporting the result on a blog.
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I looked it up and that's not what the German's Federal Office for Information Security warned about.
Yeah! (Score:5, Funny)
Giving Google all your data is not just for Windows users anymore!
TANSFAAFB! (Score:3, Funny)
There ain't no such thing as a free beer!
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Re:TANSFAAFB! (Score:5, Funny)
It does if you've been drinking.
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Your acronym is wrong. 'Thing' does not start with F.
It does if you've been drinking.
Or if you're from London.
I wouldn't be surprised... (Score:2)
Google Earth is native! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google Earth is native! (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'd like to know is why .kml/.kmz files created by Google Earth are incompatible with Google Maps.
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They aren't, it's just that Maps supports a smaller set of features than Earth does (because DHTML is less powerful than OpenGL for rendering).
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I realize Google didn't create the .kml standard (k is for "keyhole" after all), but it defies reason that I can stick a bunch of markers on Google Earth, save that as a .kml file, then try to open that up with Google Maps, and it doesn't work. I'm only using Google products here.
Re:Google Earth is native! (Score:4, Informative)
At least then it'd feel native.
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Because QT widgets aren't the exact same shape/size as windows widgets so using them would result in things probably not looking right or fitting in the space provided.
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This is ostensibly because they have no idea how Linux works and think that this makes it easier to install, but is more likely because they couldn't be bothered with making sure it looks OK when the sizes of the widgets change like everyone else does.
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The first one was wine.
Then I tried for long a Qt one.
This one looks like it is wine again! but your comment has made me check the things, and seems you're right after all:
ldd googleearth-bin
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000) libgcc_s.so.1 =>
libstdc++.so.6 =>
libQtCore.so.4 =>
libQtGui.so.4 =>
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Yeah, it's kind of like Word 6.0 for dos, which actually had all of windows 3.1 embedded in it.
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No, they are Trolltech Qt Applications and they run using native OS X functionality.
If people keep partying over non native Applications having same security risks and horrible programming model running on their OS, what you say will become reality.
OS X is under way bigger threat than Linux because of the market, community profile and the CPU. PowerPC was stopping the Windows junk making their way to OS X, not anymore.
Native port? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please help with the port (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Please help with the port (Score:4, Insightful)
Does Linux users, especially the newbies who just comes from Windows land need such a potential privacy killer?
They moved to Linux because their Windows became impossible to use since they kept not reading EULAs and leaving "default options" checked.
Re:Please help with the port (Score:5, Insightful)
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Chicken and egg thing, even hurting OS X users who has more support from commercial companies.
If WINE and their commercial stuff like Cider has reached a point which allows an advanced windows application to be packed and ready to run in 6 days, companies won't spend too much time coding "real" stuff. They will keep shipping exe files masked as .bin or .app .
Believe or not, Apple gaming became worse after Intel CPU and Cider introduced. It is a matter of time and politics to get Internet Explorer to OS X la
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You're missing a few points though.
1. I can see a number of people purchasing the Windows version of MSOffice because it has VB macro support.
2. A number of web developers would use IE on and off. I'm sure there are a few bank sites that still only support IE with active X.
3. Games use their own guis for immersion. Done correctly, no Mac user would ever notice. Especially for games I could see Mac users bending backwards so they wouldn't have to boot up Windows.
4. If Wine becomes more streamlined, I can
Works pretty well for me (Score:2, Informative)
it is a remarkable achievement (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:it is a remarkable achievement (Score:4, Funny)
Now, 12, that's just pushing it. And 10 would have been unrealistic.
In Just 11 Days (Score:5, Funny)
'In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.'
How long would it take to send it back?
Re:In Just 11 Days (Score:4, Funny)
'In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.'
How long would it take to send it back?
It's like the trash in your collage apartment; let it start stinking first and then someone will take it out.
I give it about three days.
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It's like the trash in your collage apartment; let it start stinking first and then someone will take it out.
Kind of hard when it's pasted to the wall.
All the vendors wave your hands in the air and say (Score:4, Funny)
BTW, we don't care about your hippy licensing schemes yet. Try back in 10 years.
Re:All the vendors wave your hands in the air and (Score:2)
wow, chrome is cool, but NONETHELESS all in caps aligns really funny on this ported version. It almost looks like when you type LaTeX
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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It's pretty easy to tell it's something other than a native Mac application. It has that raw look of an X app, which is appropriate I guess.
It's interesting. I'm happy they did it as a proof of concept. Good for them. I'd rather drink paint than use it, though.
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The size of the package might be a clue. I hope the original isn't 34Mb ..
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Linux version on Ubuntu is rather ugly.
It works alright and I'm posting with it but its missing the correct font encoding.
11 days? (Score:2, Informative)
Oh, yes, it did! (Score:2, Informative)
That said, the wine community in general did contribute a lot to this, too.
Linux: no video! (Score:2)
Linux: no video!
Google Sketchup on Wine? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish CodeWeavers would go and get Google SketchUp, their "easy 3D drawing" program, to work on Wine for Linux. Because that's the only way to make models to export into Google Earth (Earth does have a Linux version, SketchUp does not).
There's all kinds of crashing problems with SketchUp on Wine in simple things like opening/saving/exporting files, corrupted cursors and icons, which a team like CodeWeavers could probably straighten out pretty quick. Since Google hasn't shown any progress towards releasing a Linux version of SketchUp, someone else has to do the work.
....only way to export into Google Earth. (Score:2)
My 3D editor will have Google Earth export in the next couple of weeks.
I'm told it works on Wine but a native Linux version could happen anyway.
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Even just a commandline util that converts .SKP to .KML/.KMZ files would be a breakthru, if it were FOSS.
The Internet... (Score:5, Funny)
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More technical details (Score:5, Informative)
Cheers,
Jeremy
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So it should be this weekend's version? Cool :-)
Wine SSL support mission (Score:2)
Of course this is all a useless exercise for the purposes for which Chrome would really be useful: running google apps. Without SSL support working in Wine, I can't even log in. Until SSL works, chrome under wine is a mere curiosity, and a wine technology demo as Codeweavers says.
Has anyone actually tried running it? (Score:2)
I feel so free! (Score:2, Funny)
Now I, a poor Linux user, can give Google [today.com] my confidential business data, bank account details, medical information, personal preferences in pornography and DNA code! And it'll all be entirely confidential between me and their marketing department!
But they're still not evil. If they were evil, I'd have to search using Windows Live.
The Fonts on Linux Suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Case in point: http://img140.imageshack.us/my.php?image=chromeox9.jpg [imageshack.us]
Ah well. I guess it'll give me something to play with until Google puts out an official Linux build.
No Flash in Linux. (Score:2)
No good in Linux.
In just 11 days (Score:2)
Free as in beer (Score:2)
Free beer still tastes the same.
Re:For those of you using Firefox on linux.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't work for me. "wine ChromeSetup.exe" gives
fixme:advapi:CheckTokenMembership ((nil) 0x12a078 0x33f930) stub! fixme:process:SetProcessShutdownParameters (00000280, 00000001): partial stub. fixme:ole:CoInitializeSecurity ((nil),-1,(nil),(nil),6,2,(nil),64,(nil)) - stub! fixme:winhttp:WinHttpOpen ((null), 1, (null), (null), 0x0): stub
Good for Crossover!
How 'bout you actually try the Crossover packages then like you were supposed to? http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/ [codeweavers.com]
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Because I'm curious.
Re:For those of you using Firefox on linux.... (Score:5, Informative)
Cheers,
Jeremy
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Wine 1.1.3, it sorta worked in a crashy sorta way. Wine 1.1.4, it installed and mostly worked except SSL. I expect a fully working Chrome in Wine 1.1.5 or 1.1.6. Here's to fortnightly releases!
Really, I'm amazed just how good Wine is these days - and when it isn't yet, how easy it is to add support for a new whizbang app when you really need to.
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Is the gist of what I'd written, before I hit 'Submit', and it crashed (Taking my internet connection, requiring a restart!).
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I was able to install it in openSUSE with Wine 1.1.3.
http://lizards.opensuse.org/2008/09/04/google-chrome-on-opensuse/ [opensuse.org]
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That's why I stopped compulsively posting Frist P$0t trolls(Unless the article has to do with Macs! ^_^ ).
Re:"just" 11 days? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, like a lot of :) For instance it does all the multi-process and security stuff. But then it also does what a lot of Windows programs do these days and replace the standard window management stuff as well. It relies on parts of Internet Explorer as well (like the HTTP library).
Windows apps Chrome does some, uh, interesting things that you might not expect a them to do
If you want an example of the sort of fun they had making things work, the bug this patch fixes [winehq.org] was "Chrome URL bar has a black background" yet the fix is to the low level assembly generated by Wines build process. That's because Chrome shims BeginPaint/EndPaint by patching the in-memory system DLL headers, so it can muck about with the Windows richedit control internals and the Chrome IAT patcher didn't support Borland style imports.
For a program that has such complicated interactions with the OS, and is so heavily reliant on it for functionality, 11 days is remarkably good actually. A good sign of Wines increasing maturity.
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Astounding how anyone would want to emulate Windows.
Did the thought occur that emulating windows might be one of the best ways to provoke its downfall? As to motivations less sinister; windows native is the default for software these days, despite repeated "years of linux on the desktop". I use OS X most of the time now, Windows for gaming, Linux for playing.
Why would you want to emulate windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, aside from the fact WINE is NOT emulating, ever think you need to run an application that is ONLY available on Windows?
Happens all the time in business. You can rant and rave all you want about alternatives or boycotting, or demanding a *nix port, but the reality is you have your business to attend too.
Sure, still push for that alternative, but you still gotta be running TODAY, not someday, and WINE can often do that for you and still let you ditch Windows along the way..
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No kidding.
I'm just disappointed with WINE. 10 years ago I was SURE that I'd be able to just run Windows apps in Linux - heck, I was able to run the two most IMPORTANT Windows apps - Minespeeper and Solitaire.
Nowadays I try to run Linux on my work desktop, but sadly WINE in my case stands for Wine Is Not Enough. So I use the much heavier VMWare when I need real Windows apps.
WINE seems like it was catching up, but then there was WinXP (and OfficeXP) and then Vista (and Office 2007) etc etc. Just not happenin
You're looking at it wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
You're looking at it wrong. Wine will not truly shine (I made a rhyme!) until developers start thinking of it as a tool for porting their programs to Linux/Mac OS X. For this, Mac and Linux markets becoming large enough is a natural and slightly lofty prerequisite. Wine itself only has to reach adequate compatibility status.
During porting, large studios will use Wine to simplify and speed up the job. Rather than changing their code to make it compatible with Wine deficiencies, it will make more sense to
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