Friday, 5 September 2008

Of Chrome and Chromium

You may recall my annoyance at the lack of a Linux implementation of the Chrome browser - and the note on the source code page:

Note: There is no working Chromium-based browser on Linux. Although many Chromium submodules build under Linux and a few unit tests pass, all that runs is a command-line "all tests pass" executable.

Yes, that one. Well, there is a reason for that, and it hasn't made me any happier about Chrome. The reason is that Chromium is just the browser engine, it isn't a browser in its own right.

Just in case you don't believe me, there is the following nugget of info on the same page:

Google Chrome is built with open source code from Chromium.

See what I mean? I get the sneaky suspicion that I might have a long wait before I'm running a native Linux version of Chrome.

The upside, of course, is that is someone is really desperate to have a Chromium based browser on Linux (or MacOS X for that matter) then at least the engine is there, ready for someone to build a nice front end for it, but as to the exact license of the Chrome (browser) elements - I'll have to do some digging (apparently it may be BSD but I've yet to confirm that).

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