Chrome on Mac and Linux: Buggy and Unsupported, But It Works
Codeweavers, those cross-system wizards behind Wine, have shown off their prowess by releasing a version of Google’s Chrome to Mac and Linux ahead of Google’s own attempts.
The browser, labeled Crossover Chromium, is pulled straight from the open source code.
Of course, these versions are built on modified versions of Wine, and are, in Codeweaver’s words, “just a proof of concept, for fun, and to showcase what Wine can do.”
So a bunch of Wine developers show off, and what do we get? A fully functioning Google browser (minus the auto-updater). Hooray for showoffs.
The fast turnaround says a few things about the state of interoperability today.
- The lines between operating systems are being blurred. It’s been two weeks since Chrome was announced and already there is an unofficial port?
- Based on my experience, there’s still some serious weird speed and font factors to overcome in virtualization. I remember Chrome being a lot faster on the native Windows version. The Linux version fared a little better. Not sure why. Fonts are weirdly bitmapped and off-centered.
- Once Wine solves the speed issues, it has the potential to create a wrapper around any application to make it work anywhere. It’s an interesting prospect for other high-demand Windows releases, anyway.
It doesn’t look like Codeweavers are going to be continuing support of Crossover Chromium, so Mac and Linux users will have to wait until a native version is available, which shouldn’t be too long. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin has a Mac, and from his shared announcement a couple weeks ago, he claims to have been pushing the Chrome team for a version he can use outside of VMWare.
So now the only question is, what are you going to use to download it? Safari? Opera? Firefox? Konqueror?
