Mac Chrome Starting to Look Like a Real Browser
Google’s Chrome launched September of 2008 without even an inkling of Mac and Linux support. Time has passed and it looks like open-source development of a Mac version has seen a lot of action. In fact, a skeleton version of the browser is now working on Macs. According to the developers’ site:
As of mid-Feb 09, we now have an application that looks a lot like our vision for Chromium on Mac OS X and can create windows and tabs using the same cross-platform infrastructure used by Windows and Linux, but using a Cocoa UI layer on top. As tabs are created, new renderer processes are created (you can see them in Activity Monitor), and they go away when the tab closes. Pages correctly render in their respective tab and the “sad tab” page appears when a renderer crashes. Typing in the URL bar works to surf the web, as does clicking links.
It’s starting to look and feel like a browser!
Even the speedy V8 JavaScript engine is working on all non-PowerPC macs.
Google Chrome is being ported under open source licenses from the Windows version codenamed Chromium. The browser is designed to be both fast and uber stable, but based on the same rendering engine (read: it draws web pages the same) as the Mac OS built-in browser, Safari. Linux Chrome progress is looking to be far worse than the Mac version’s progress. The only Linux builds available are infrastructure tests — practically where it started when Chrome was first announced.
This is exciting for Mac users, like Google co-founder Sergey Brin. You may be asking yourself why the Mac or any other operating system needs another browser. As Chrome developer (and former Mozilla developer) Ben Goodger claims “browsers suck.” In the search for a better browser, Chrome is concerned with making web content its focus rather than the browser itself and its related bells and whistles.
But don’t start downloading Mac Chrome yet; Recent builds are still buggy and error-prone. The current iteration is going to be more frustrating to use than any other Mac browser available now, even Firefox 3.1 betas nicknamed “minefield.”
[A tip of the hat to ReadWriteWeb for its interview with Goodger, ]
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