Chromium for Linux and Mac! (Well, sort of. . .)

I think I've made my opinion of the release of the Windows only Chrome beta pretty clear - but just in case you've not been paying attention - I'm less than impressed.

I did, however, point out that with the source being available someone might be able to put something together for those of us not stuck on Windows.



Codeweavers have done just that.

In eleven days they've used their Wine based porting tools to put together a version of the browser for Linux (and MacOS too!) based around the Developer Build 21 release of Chrome.

A couple of things to note however are that there is no automatic updater for this unofficial package. Another is that as this is almost a beta of a beta you shouldn't use it as your main browser, just think of it as a tech preview.

Packages are available for most major Linux distro's here.

I've not installed it yet, but once I've done so then I'll let you how it compares to the native Windows version.

So how well does it work? It is certainly a lot slower to use than a native browser such as FireFox on my trusty old Athlon XP 2200, but was certainly up to day to day browsing, in fact I'm updating this post using Chromium. I'm not sure if the lack of speed is down to Chromium itself, or due to the porting process.

More importantly - you can watch YouTube videos, at last once you've installed the Windows version of the Flash plugin (which you can do via the browser, just remember to quit and restart the browser afterwards).

It probably isn't worth using this as your main browser, but is certainly nice as a "fill in" until the proper native version of Chromium comes out.

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Google Chrome - First Impressions

Updated 04/09/2008

Google, masters of the search engine, blogging, advertising and God only knows what else, now want the web browser market too.

To this end they have created a new browser, Chrome, which is currently in Beta.

Well, created may be too strong a word. They've taken parts of multiple open source projects, such as Apple's Webkit (or KDE's Konqueror as I prefer to remember it), Mozilla, and others, and mixed them all up to make Chrome.

You could describe it as Safari, with knobs on.

Well, I've installed it on a spare Windows PC, and yes, it works well. Text renders well, the browser certainly feels nice and snappy - much like Safari, strangely enough.

There are some nice features, such as the "Task Manager" which shows what elements of the browser are using your CPU time (or, to put it another way, you can see how much the Flash Plugin is hogging).

Google Gears is also integrated into Chrome, which gives offline support to some web apps. This isn't particularly useful now, as there are hardly any Google Gears enabled sites, but this should come in time.

Now for the negatives. If you read the "End User License" for Chrome, you come across the following gems:

11. Content licence from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organisations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

Oh dear, that doesn't sound too nice. Whatever happend to Google's "do no evil" credo?

(Update: This has now been changed.

The new section reads as follows:

11. Content licence from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.

That is much less evil, so thank you Google.)

Something else that really gets on my tits about Chrome, is the lack of a Linux port (and the same for MacOS X too). Considering most of the code originated with Linux that is beyond insulting.

OK, so you can download the source code (from here if you are interested) but to be honest - I wouldn't bother at the moment if I were you.

I was going to build Chrome on my Ubuntu install and give it a shot, even if it wasn't quite as complete as the Windows version - but according to the download 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.


Great. Cheers for that. So we have an "Open Source" browser that, at the present time, is Windows only.

Nice one! Well done Google! (Did you spot the sarcasm there? I think you did!)

Hopefully they will be trying to rectify this sooner rather than later. I've added myself to the mailing list for news about the Linux port of the browser, and as soon as there is something worth testing I'll let you know what it is like.

Slightly more worrying is the well publicised Safari security hole that also affects Chrome (strange that, isn't it). So if you are security conscious you may want want to think twice before installing. . .

So a bit of a mixed bag this. If it wasn't for the license, bugs and the fact that I can't install the damn thing on Linux, I'd probably switch to it. But as it stands at the moment, I'll just say that it shows promise and wait for it to come out of beta.

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