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So here's the story; Google releases a new Chromium build that does three things:
1) A copy of the Flash plugin gets installed when Chrome/Chromium is installed, regardless of whether you already have it.
2) Chrome/Chromium now runs its copy of the Flash plugin in a sandbox, so that malicious Flash content can't access your computer.
3) Chrome/Chromium will now auto-scan for updates to the Flash plugin and install them in an automated fashion upon launch.

So basically, the real story is that this is a security update for Chromium, mitigating many of the vulnerabilities with the current setup of having the Flash runtime be run with user privileges from a central location for all browsers, and managed by no one at all.

There's also an announcement of a partnership between Google, Mozilla and Adobe to work on a new API for browser plugins, presumably involving browsers taking a more active role in managing their plugins, and allowing certain features like sandboxing and implementation of some type of common interface standards.

What we get instead is reporting of Google thwarting Apple's putative war on Flash, somehow breathing new life into the beleaguered standard, where Apple would surely do the opposite of whatever Google is doing. I'd not be surprised to see Safari adopt some very similar features in the near future, as they all make pretty good sense, at least for their desktop browser. If only these "journalists" knew enough about what they were reporting to recognize their need to eat crow at that point.

Once again, calculating Chrome's memory usage is not as simple as summing the memory usage of all its processes, because shared libraries are only loaded once. It's unclear as to whether these benchmarks took this into account. More info here.

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/

Since everyone seems to be listing off what they think Chrome should and should not be doing for new features, here's my list:

Add an option to make it look like every other window i've got. Maybe some people like the round-cornered title bar-less window, but i find it annoying. Not only is it aesthetically annoying to have it so different from everything else, but i often have trouble finding it amidst all the other windows i've got open because i mentally locate everything by the title bar. I often have to select Chrome from the task bar just to find it when it turns out that the part which should have been the title bar was already visible.

The folder tab bar needs to be relocatable to the "normal" position just above the pages themselves. They can use whatever structural hierarchy behind the scenes that they want, but when i look at Firefox i visualize a filing cabinet full of files. When look at Chrome i can't help but visualize an entire row of filing cabinets, one cabinet for each individual file folder. In a related usability comment, i often do a google search for a term, open up multiple tabs from that search, and then do a text find on the search term on each of the pages. In Firefox this is easy because the search box is part of the browser so i can just switch pages and hit the "next" button. In Chrome the search box is (of course) part of the tab, so i have to open a new search box every time i switch to a new tab. This is not a helpful feature.

I do appreciate that unlike with Firefox i can actually reclaim memory by closing old tabs. (Despite repeated claims of memory improvements in every version of Firefox, after a couple days of use it's still sucking up a gig and a half of memory, and closing individual tabs has almost no affect on the usage.) However in the 24 hour trial i did Chrome ended up using 886 megs of private memory to Firefox's 911 megs, which is a pretty even comparison, but _5275_ megs of virtual memory to Firefox's 1038 megs!

They also need to add a drop-down menu to let you jump to a specific tab, like Firefox, and they need to add a minimum width for the tabs, like Firefox, and they need to add a scrollable tab bar, like Firefox. The Chrome developers have made a blog post explaining why those are all bad design decisions. They admit that their current system causes problems, but they don't want to implement a "bad" design choice, and they they don't want to give the user options (because that's another "bad" design choice.)

Okay guys, you made that post a YEAR ago. You STILL haven't figured out a better way to fix those problems. Perhaps you ought to let us use Firefox's "bad" solutions rather than trying to convince us to continue using an admittedly broken product while you sit around failing to think of the "right" way to do it.

And i don't care how much you value your opinions as designers or how much you think reducing options "forces you to come up with the right approach," no single system is going to be the "right" one for everyone, and giving the users options to customize software to fit their own needs is not a failure! This is the same mindset that resulted in minimizing the options for privacy in Buzz, because you were so sure you'd come up with the perfect way to handle privacy. It turns out that not everyone thinks the same as you. Of course in that case everyone had the choice between canceling their gmail account or complaining loudly until you fixed things. It's "too bad" for you that in the case of Chrome everyone who disagrees with your design choices can just quietly go back to Firefox or Safari or IE or whatever else they were using before without voicing loud complaints.
And as a final note, i'm also annoyed by the stupid behaviour of tabs getting opened right after the tab you opened them from. I read their reasons about why they did that in the above post. It doesn't fit my usage. It would have been nice if they'd made

You don't have to "trust" their browser at all.

The source code for Chrome is freely available. If you find any features that are unfriendly towards privacy, you're free to modify the source.

Chrome has required Mac OS X 10.5 on an Intel processor as a minimum since the beginning. I still remember people complaining about it in this blog post (despite the fact that it was a software still in *alpha* back then): http://blog.chromium.org/2009/06/danger-mac-and-linux-builds-available.html

Bullshit, I just built chromium with h.264 support. As for Chrome not being open source, the ENTIRE CODE is released under the chromium project other than the google logo's, the update manager, and RLZ.

http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-discuss/browse_thread/thread/c82bf49672a213f4

Chromium is the name we have given to the open source project and the browser source code that we released and maintain at www.chromium.org. One can compile this source code to get a fully working browser. Google takes this source code, and adds on the Google name and logo, an auto-updater system called GoogleUpdate, and RLZ (described later in this post), and calls this Google Chrome.

http://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/google-chrome-chromium-and-google.html

a href="http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-discuss/browse_thread/thread/c82bf49672a213f4">http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-discuss/browse_thread/thread/c82bf49672a213f4

I am trying to build Chromium with support for H.264 video support enabled. AFAICT, it looks like adding ffmpeg_branding=Chrome to the gyp defines should be all that is necessary

...but Chromium isn't open source...

Incorrect.

I just talked about this in the other Chrome article, but all the bugs i'd like to report they claim to be features.

Even though they say they know it causes problems they'd rather continue to have a browser with issues rather than implement proven solutions that other browsers have come up with because they have aesthetic issues with those solutions.

I really don't appreciate them making the product less useful to me because they don't like the solutions other people have come up with but can't think of anything better themselves. In my mind that counts as a bug, but that's not a definition they're going to accept.

Improving security is great, but they really need to keep working on usability as well! I just installed Chrome for the first time yesterday and have been playing around with it. It seems pretty speedy but the UI is a bit weird.

The lack of a title bar seems kind of weird. I don't know what they were going for with that, but it's the only window on my entire machine and it stands out, and not in a good way. At one point i tried adding a new tab while waiting for visual studio to start a debug session, and the UI hung up for a little bit, and for a few brief seconds Chrome acquired a title bar. I actually thought it looked better that way. A couple minor aesthetic gripes. I may eventually get used to having the tab bar above the toolbar, though currently it seems pretty funky to me.

I haven't done a side-by-side comparison with Firefox yet, but my initial rough estimates seem to be that Chrome uses at least 75% as much memory as Firefox, possibly more, and at least as much virtual memory. I find the fact that Chrome has about 40 process running right now to be rather awkward, but hopefully it at least means that when i start closing large numbers of tabs that the memory will actually be released (unlike Firefox.)

The biggest problem however is the tab bar. Personally i don't like having new tabs open in the middle of the bar, screwing up the ordering, but it was easy to find an extension to fix that behavior. However if you open up a lot of tabs they just get smaller and smaller until you can't see what each of them is anymore. And to my further frustration there's no way to access a list of the tabs. There are a couple extensions that offer some kind of tab index, but nothing that presents a simple list like in Firefox.

After a little searching i found out the reason for these problems in a Chromium blog post. The designers are approaching the UI design from a heavily aesthetic angle. Which is good in theory, but they're also being fanatical about it. If they don't think a feature is aesthetically correct but can't think of a more aesthetically pleasing way to implement it they just won't implement the feature at all, even though they admit that the lack of that feature causes usability problems!

And to wrap it all up, they say "In all of these areas we've resisted adding options to control behavior. Keeping our set of options minimal is a good forcing function for us as user interface designers to come up with the right approach, since we never rely on the crutch of making the user decide what we were unable to."

Well i hate to tell you guys, but it doesn't seem to be working really well as a "forcing function" given that you've crippled an important part of the UI while dithering about what the "best" way to implement it is. The blog post was made a year ago and they apparently still haven't found a solution! And i find it very aggravating that they feel once they've come up with the "right" approach they don't want to provide options to do it any other way. Clearly if the user has a different aesthetic sense than the designer then the user is wrong! I've dealt with designers like this on projects before, and trying to convince them that the users can legitimately have a different opinion is a very frustrating task.

I remember the painful process of Firefox developers trying to get their tab bar into a useful state under similar circumstances. Perhaps their solution isn't 100% aesthetically appealing to the Chrome designers, but it undeniably _works_, and leaving the users hanging while they try to figure out something more "aesthetically" and "spatially" pleasing seems like pure egotism to me.

Chromium blog post on the new security features, some of which are rather interesting

http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

Do I get $30 million for finding that for him?

You can run plugins in a sandbox in Chrome. Use the --safe-plugins command line switch.

Chromium OS is the development version of Chrome OS which, when released during 2nd half of 2010, is also going to be completely open source.

That's great and all but I'm afraid I'm going to have to say having entered the real world and been working a real job, I was deluding myself into thinking OSS was the way to go.

There needs to be a deadline, set features, and programmers getting paid full to time to write code that they don't want to write, for important things to get done in the OS. I hope Google will provide this?
Example would be that mouse-over-button bug that was in bugzilla for 6 years before somebody got the nerve to go unpack the problem and rework the bits of the code that needed to be reworked so that a window with a button in it that was drawn under where the mouse currently was would actually automatically hilight the button and let you click it. Before this guy got the balls go and fix it, it sat there. And bugged the hell out of me for 3 years while I deluded myself into thinking the OSS development model was superior.
--Which it is. In a perfect world, where people don't only want to write new, exciting code, and are willing to write legible documentation, as well as code.
Until then, Linux's Firefox/Fasterfox still runs dog slow on my quad core 3.5Ghz processor, and so does Gnome, because whatever is down there in the Linux kernel is so darn bloated that even Windows Vista is faster...snappier.

You can mod me troll if you like, I'm just reporting what I've seen. I used to love Linux, and it will always have a special place in my heart, [and I'm not coder] but it's just not fast, no matter what hardware I throw at it.

Here's to hoping having a massive netbook installbase will motivate the OSS crowd to not just tell us to default to XFCE and Fluxbox when we want a faster GUI.

Chromium is the open source versions where Chrome are the "Google Experience" ones. http://dev.chromium.org/ has them listed as Chromium and Chromium OS.

Chromium OS is the development version of Chrome OS which, when released during 2nd half of 2010, is also going to be completely open source.

The only browser I've seen that can properly close memory from closed tabs is Chrome.

I'm using Chrome 4 on Linux. I just closed all but one tab, and adding up the resident memory for all four chrome processes listed in the System Monitor, I see that Chrome is using about 120 MB of RAM. For some reason, about:memory says Chrome is using only 88 MB.

Because a lot of the memory is shared between the processes, so you're counting some libraries and such multiple times when only one copy actually exists in memory. See this blog post for more details. The only reliable way to test how much memory it's using is to kill it and see how much memory is freed, if you don't trust about:memory.

More about the difference here: http://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/google-chrome-chromium-and-google.html

#1) Google will SUBSIDIZE the cost of the netbook (aka NetPC, which was hacked out of existence).

If they're targeting the sub-$300 region as TFA says, they won't have to subsidize much, as similar netbooks (albeit with more expensive chipsets) already sell for less than that. And, uh, it's Google. A company run by hackers doing interesting things with cheap hardware. They're expecting a certain number of them to be hacked or repurposed. Also, they're not selling a separately-purchased subscription or anything with it. All they want is for people to keep using the web and this netbook helps them achieve that.

#2) Unlike NetPC, they won't be using an intel processor, locking out Windows.
--- so when joey or jane try to download and install their favorite game or chat client, it will fail.
--- so when grandma can't load in her quickbooks document for the church, it will fail.

This won't be marketed as a general-purpose computer. The things that you mentioned won't work on a Linux netbook either and that hasn't stopped netbooks from being shipped with Linux preinstalled. (Dell Mini 10, HP Mini 110, Acer Aspire One, MSI Wind, etc.) Most people just want a web browser, an email client, and instant messaging. That's the market that Google's netbook targets. Whoever buys this thing expecting to put their Windows XP Pirate Edition on it instead, deserves whatever complete lack of support they get.

#3) As someone who has lurked in many a netbook forum, I can tell you the number one question will be "How do I install Windows XP on it?"

An the #1 answer will be, "You don't. You just use it like it is." Not so hard, is it? Again, it's not meant to be a general-purpose computer. It's a specific device with a specific job: getting you on the web. Asking how to install Windows on it will make about as much sense as asking how to install OS X on a Nintendo Wii.

#4) Someone will figure out how to install alternative OSes on it, maybe even write some kind of intel CPU emulator, or real-time recompiler, and then hack Windows into running on it, and then the lawsuits begin.

Uhhh, what? The only "alternative" OS that a hacker can port to ARM is Linux or maybe one of the BSDs. Emulating an x86 CPU with any reasonable speed is simply not going to be feasible. And if it were, where would the lawsuits come from? Microsoft does not care what kind of computer you install Windows upon. And I highly doubt that Google will include an Apple-esqe EULA stating which kinds of software you can and cannot install.

Also, the Chromium OS is open source, is very well documented, and Google encourages external hacking and development.

#5) As soon as people get bored with it, into the trash heap it goes.

If you get bored with it, you either didn't need one in the first place, or you're just bored with the Internet in general. I don't think there's a lot that Google can do to prevent either of those.

When the masses get it they will be disappointed by it's lack of backwards compatibility, and start searching (ironically using Google) for websites to show them how to "jailbreak" the thing into running what they want.

The whole thrust of your thinly-veiled argument is that nobody will want it if it can't run Windows. What you fail to realize is that:

1. With the notable exception of hardcore PC gaming, there are really not many computing tasks that absolutely require windows any more. Despite Microsoft's best efforts, Internet content these days is very much OS-independent. We're to the point where most people can do e

#1) Google will SUBSIDIZE the cost of the netbook (aka NetPC, which was hacked out of existence).

If they're targeting the sub-$300 region as TFA says, they won't have to subsidize much, as similar netbooks (albeit with more expensive chipsets) already sell for less than that. And, uh, it's Google. A company run by hackers doing interesting things with cheap hardware. They're expecting a certain number of them to be hacked or repurposed. Also, they're not selling a separately-purchased subscription or anything with it. All they want is for people to keep using the web and this netbook helps them achieve that.

#2) Unlike NetPC, they won't be using an intel processor, locking out Windows.
--- so when joey or jane try to download and install their favorite game or chat client, it will fail.
--- so when grandma can't load in her quickbooks document for the church, it will fail.

This won't be marketed as a general-purpose computer. The things that you mentioned won't work on a Linux netbook either and that hasn't stopped netbooks from being shipped with Linux preinstalled. (Dell Mini 10, HP Mini 110, Acer Aspire One, MSI Wind, etc.) Most people just want a web browser, an email client, and instant messaging. That's the market that Google's netbook targets. Whoever buys this thing expecting to put their Windows XP Pirate Edition on it instead, deserves whatever complete lack of support they get.

#3) As someone who has lurked in many a netbook forum, I can tell you the number one question will be "How do I install Windows XP on it?"

An the #1 answer will be, "You don't. You just use it like it is." Not so hard, is it? Again, it's not meant to be a general-purpose computer. It's a specific device with a specific job: getting you on the web. Asking how to install Windows on it will make about as much sense as asking how to install OS X on a Nintendo Wii.

#4) Someone will figure out how to install alternative OSes on it, maybe even write some kind of intel CPU emulator, or real-time recompiler, and then hack Windows into running on it, and then the lawsuits begin.

Uhhh, what? The only "alternative" OS that a hacker can port to ARM is Linux or maybe one of the BSDs. Emulating an x86 CPU with any reasonable speed is simply not going to be feasible. And if it were, where would the lawsuits come from? Microsoft does not care what kind of computer you install Windows upon. And I highly doubt that Google will include an Apple-esqe EULA stating which kinds of software you can and cannot install.

Also, the Chromium OS is open source, is very well documented, and Google encourages external hacking and development.

#5) As soon as people get bored with it, into the trash heap it goes.

If you get bored with it, you either didn't need one in the first place, or you're just bored with the Internet in general. I don't think there's a lot that Google can do to prevent either of those.

When the masses get it they will be disappointed by it's lack of backwards compatibility, and start searching (ironically using Google) for websites to show them how to "jailbreak" the thing into running what they want.

The whole thrust of your thinly-veiled argument is that nobody will want it if it can't run Windows. What you fail to realize is that:

1. With the notable exception of hardcore PC gaming, there are really not many computing tasks that absolutely require windows any more. Despite Microsoft's best efforts, Internet content these days is very much OS-independent. We're to the point where most people can do e

I use a Chromium nightly tarball unpacked to a directory in /tmp on Slackware 13.0. It wasn't straightforward but I did get it working by copying some libraries from firefox into the same directory.

I see nothing to indicate they're going to enter the phone market themselves especially since it mentions the hardware is from "a partner".

I guess I missed the 'partner' keyword on my first read. That would seem a little bit more realistic than for Google to start manufacturing themselves. It would certainly make the OHA continue to resemble more of a playground than a battlefield.

One interesting note, is that the article does not explicitly say its a phone but rather a "device". Could this finally be the next step in the evolution of Qualcomm's SmartBook? Personally, I see it as a highly compatible platform for the Chrome OS.

Works fine on my Mac with the latest build of Chromium and the enable extension Inst bookmark.

who needs an "official" release? would you mess around with apt's keyring? i use this for about three months. it's fast and mostly stable on Debian lenny and squeeze. the v8 java script engine is a magnitude more powerful and faster than iceweasel's. put it in ~/bin or something. it's worth trying:

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/LATEST

Hmm, my bad. Well I was half right. Google Chrome and Chroms OS seem to be a marketing moniker slapped on top of Chromium and Chromium OS. It's Chromium where the development is happening and the real code lives. There's no difference as far as I can see between the Chrome browser on Windows and the Chromium browser on Linux other than the name.

Try installing it then look for yourself:

$ rpm -q chrome
package chrome is not installed
$ rpm -q chromium
chromium-4.0.252.0-0.1.20091119svn32498.fc12.i686

Then starting it from the Applications menu:

Applications --> Internet --> Chromium Web Browser

Once it's started click on the Wrench icon, then clicking on "About Chromium".

It's there and it's real.
 

Heh your comment reads like a FOX headline.

Sure there's no stable release of Chrome for Linux yet, however you can download the current dev version from http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

It's being worked on, and if anything ChromeOS (which is linux+chrome) should tell you they're taking it quite seriously

WTF? Most companies don't release nightly builds of their software.

Not when it comes to web browsers. You can get nightlies from every single other major browser, except for IE.

• Firefox
• Safari (WebKit)
• Chrome (Chromium)
• Opera (ok weeklies, but still)

Maybe they'll use this:

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software-updates-courgette

consumers won't be able to download the operating system

Yeah, the article and thus the summary say that, but it's just the result of really bad journalism. If you read the first FA it links directly to how to download the source. There's even a place to browse the git repository.

Then unless I've grabbed the wrong license file it appears to be under basically a BSDish license.

consumers won't be able to download the operating system

Yeah, the article and thus the summary say that, but it's just the result of really bad journalism. If you read the first FA it links directly to how to download the source. There's even a place to browse the git repository.

Then unless I've grabbed the wrong license file it appears to be under basically a BSDish license.

1. Chrome OS will never need to get updated (because it is perfect from start)

All of its apps will be web apps. They will always be updated, because you use them directly from the server. So the updates should be way less common.

2. it will never need any anti-virus

Pretty much. It will have a read only root fs, a tmpfs based /tmp, and it won't allow the execution of any binary in $HOME, and every process and web app will be sandboxed. http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/security-overview

3. the only one who will ever see his personal data is some senior sysadmin and some viral marketing salespeople at Google, and you can totally trust those guys.

Well, with that one I agree, but it'll be open source, so hopefully "internal trojans" can be spotted.

I went and RTFA (and I'm not even new around here!). They have pretty much the same boot process as with Android devices. A read-only, signed firmware that passes control off to a R/W chip. I strongly recommend this link, but keep going and read all their security design docs. It is much more than just a small linux + Firefox + blahblah. Yeah, they're doing stuff any other manufacturer could be doing with linux, but this looks to be a very interesting set of designs and rules.

PEBCAK?

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/archives/chromiumos-0.4.22.8.tar.gz

well, actually... chrome os is just that: a linux distribution with some custom google software. Ubuntu-based distribution...
http://src.chromium.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=chromiumos.git;a=blob;f=src/package_repo/package-list-prod.txt

After finding this link: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/security-overview

I'm impressed. I wasn't expecting that much in the way of security in this offering, but I'm actually pleasantly surprised by how much thought Google has put into this, both from remote attacks and local (stolen computer/device).

Three notable things:

I like is the fact that items that log on and use Google's authentication mechanism work online, and offline by using a local cached hash table.

The segmenting of the Web browser. This is something every Web browser should do, so one buggy plugin doesn't mean a completely rooted system.

Very well thought out boot path with initial key values stored in an unalterable chip. Next to a TPM boot, this is a good way to protect against corrupted boot attacks.

My only wish is that the device didn't use an Owner/user priv model. This is just fine for devices and home computers, but when you get to the enterprise where you have to have machines have a "master-root" user (usually an Active Directory) admin, there will be issues.

Google has never explicitly mentioned it(at least to my knowledge); but I don't think that it is rocket surgery to infer the likely possibilities.

For basic casual flash stuff, there will almost certainly be flash support(since Adobe seems to at least be promising to get off their ass about reasonably supporting non wintel platforms). In the longer term, Google's work on making javascript really fast will, when combined with SVG or WebGL, allow flash level games to be produced with stock web technologies.

For native binary stuff, Google's quiet-but-interesting NaCL project seems like a likely candidate, most probably using ordinary web technologies and the Chrome browser as the desktop UI; but with cached NaCL lumps for applications that can't be done any other way. One might also expect to see Courgette used to efficiently update those cached NaCL components.

For games beyond the capability of the hardware that ChromeOS will typically be running one(since it seems to be aimed at the weak-'n-cheap end of the market) I'd assume that one of two things will happen: If the various "game streaming" offerings that are sprouting up turn out to actually work reasonably well, one or more will probably end up being available for ChromeOS(either purchased and integrated, or because ChromeOS supports third party NaCL objects). If they end up being laggy crap, Google will probably just ignore the problem, reasoning that everybody's slow and cheap hardware suffers from the same fundamental limitations in that area, and so the lack of more sophisticated games isn't a huge issue

Chrome for Linux is in a development/unstable state (i.e. it's in the alpha stage right now, AFAICT). That means it could e.g. randomly segfault or something (hypothetically anyway; I have no experience with Google products in the alpha stage so I wouldn't know how stable their stuff is.).

Until it has that or built in addblock and vimperator, no chrome here.

So run the dev channel. It has extensions today. Yes, including ad blockers. Dev channel is actually perfectly usable if you don't mind the occasional disembodied head taking the place of a button. Dev channel Chrome has been my primary browser for over a year now.

Me too. Best part is, you can get Glen's head back by running "google-chrome --glen". (At least on Linux.) I highly recommend you freak out all your fellow Chrome users by changing their browser shortcuts when they aren't looking!

The dev channel may be more stable than the nightly builds.

You mean this?

(It's dev channel, meaning it's still a little finicky, but it is good enough to be my primary browser on Mac.)

Until it has that or built in addblock and vimperator, no chrome here.

So run the dev channel. It has extensions today. Yes, including ad blockers. Dev channel is actually perfectly usable if you don't mind the occasional disembodied head taking the place of a button. Dev channel Chrome has been my primary browser for over a year now.

Developer releases are available here: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

OSX, Ubuntu 8.04+ (32/64) and Debian 5 (32)

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

Which can be found by visiting:

http://www.google.com/search?q=chromium+mac+download

Imagine that.

I stopped bothering with Chromium, Safari isn't different enough to justify the instability of Chromium for me.

FYI, nightly builds for all platforms (Mac, Win, Linux, Linux x64) available here: http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

Should get official versions soon, I guess, but I find any given nightly build (on Linux) fast and reliable.

From what I've read, that download is a bit outdated. But you can get nightly builds here.

yes. check out http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

Are you aware of the Chrome (not Chromium) binaries?

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel scroll down to Mac and download the dmg.

Why not grab the source code, install gcc from your OS X Developer Tools disc and try it for yourself?

Get the source here

But where can I get the source code of the plugin itself? (I mean, not the rendering engine for this plugin, but the IE plugin part that glues it to IE)
Can't find it in the Google Code page.

Follow the links on the Chromium project: http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome_frame/

Its on its way to Linux. Chromium has been stable for a couple of weeks so now here is a dev release of Chrome. Works very well on debian at least.

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel