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CodeWeavers Package Google Chrome For Linux and Mac
jfbilodeau writes "The fine folks at Codeweavers performed an 11 day experiment in getting Google Chrome working on Linux and Mac. Their efforts resulted in the Chromium proof of concept. 'Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be. In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.' Caveat: their implementation is free as in beer but not free as in speech."
Google's vision isn't truly understood by everyone, IMHO. Google knew that the Open Source community would fork and port Chrome anyway and that freed up time for developers to work out the system bugs and get the thing live. Releasing the source code is a redeemable action from the many gripes that flooded about Google not offering Linux or Mac support in Chrome on launch, among other things.
Now I personally would like to see a fork that would upgrade Chrome to remove any significant Windows reliance. I don't trust Microsoft to put my interests first and therefore I don't like the idea of a browser that relies so heavily on Microsoft for security.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Here's a link to their download location: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?hl=en . I tried getting there using Firefox---excuse me: Iceweasel---on a debian installation, and it wouldn't direct the browser to a place to download. Konqueror kept crashing on their "save as" button. So I copied the link location from Konqueror to Iceweasel, and was able to get it that way. Now I'll try it in the latest Wine...
Giving Google all your data is not just for Windows users anymore!
There ain't no such thing as a free beer!
...if Codeweavers stuff was licensed for google to put Chrome out for Linux/Mac before the native versions are done, considering he Linux versions of Google Earth and Picasa are actually just the windows versions wrapped in with compatability code (either from wine or Codeweavers).
Good job getting it to work with wine, and verily I say that wine has come a *long* way since I started using it six years ago, but we all know what we'd really like to see: a native port of the application.
I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it.
I've been playing with it (and am using it to post this response). On the plus side: it actually runs gmail and youtube usably. On the minus side: it has a number of cosmetic and speed issues. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the Wine community to fix the remaining bugs. Disclaimer: I'm a Wine developer, so I'm biased.
Dangit, I wish people would stop spreading the false meme that Google Earth has anything to do with Wine! It's native!
to have done that in 11 days.
'In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.'
How long would it take to send it back?
If anyone has some free cycles, please come help get the Linux port going. There's lots to do. See http://dev.chromium.org/
I'm rich and powerful now. I don't give a fuck about what you think, peon.
This is my baby and it's purpose is to use positive reinforcement to allow morons to feel smart. This keeps the n00bs and the underlings on my short leash so that, when my secret projects(SlashBrowser, SlashSearch) are complete, the brand loyalty will make me bigger than those pussies Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Steve Ballmy.
You'd best step off from sowing discord before I sic Scientology on your ass, punk.
--Signed,
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Hello, non-Windows world! We greet you with our awkwardly modified code that NONETHELESS runs on your systems!
BTW, we don't care about your hippy licensing schemes yet. Try back in 10 years.
I just downloaded the Mac OS X version from the link in TFA, and am using it to submit this post. It works, although the response seems a little slow, particularly with scrolling and window resizing. The amazing thing is that I never would have known this was done under Wine -- there was nothing else to install beyond the browser package itself. Very impressive.
You expect me to pollute my Mac with Chromium?
Living in New Jersey, there's more than enough of it around, thankyouverymuch.
It may have taken 11 days for code weavers to package it (that really isn't supposed to be flaming code weavers, i have nothing against them.) but it didn't take near that long to have a working Chrome in wine. It was drastically less than 48 hours after release in actuality. I was one of the early ones working towards a solution with bug reports, and i remember waking up to an AppDB report of a functional browser albeit with a few tweaks, but working nonetheless. Just saying, Thanks to the awesome community of Wine users, this application was usable (not for the feint of heart) in 2 days, and i thought they should get credit for that :)
Linux: no video!
That said, the wine community in general did contribute a lot to this, too.
Why does it take 11 days to get Chromium to work under Wine? Why doesn't it just run?
Google's Chrome is overhyped. Yes I know it's just beta (what from Google isn't?), but I would describe Chrome's development stage as pre-alpha.
I wish CodeWeavers would go and get Google SketchUp, their "easy 3D drawing" program, to work on Wine for Linux. Because that's the only way to make models to export into Google Earth (Earth does have a Linux version, SketchUp does not).
There's all kinds of crashing problems with SketchUp on Wine in simple things like opening/saving/exporting files, corrupted cursors and icons, which a team like CodeWeavers could probably straighten out pretty quick. Since Google hasn't shown any progress towards releasing a Linux version of SketchUp, someone else has to do the work.
--
make install -not war
Duly impressed in their success in porting in less than two weeks, I downloaded the Mac port. Alas, the joy is short-lived. It's terribly slow, locked up for short periods a couple of times, and had a generally poor user experience. It was not dock-aware, had odd-looking widgets that looked poor compared to Firefox or Safari, and didn't integrate with the OS at all. I suspect that's par for the course for a Wine-ported app, but the end experience is worse than running Chrome in Parallels desktop in Coherence mode.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Although predictable (they did the same with Picasa...), it's just really a hack. I mean, as good as Wine is, it will never compete with a browser which is designed to run natively on a platform. I am curious to see benchmarks on JavaScript performance and stability, for example. If Chrome wants to be a real competitor in the browser war for Macs and Linux, it can only be it with real, officially supported versions. Otherwise it's just a pointless showcase.
In case anyone is interested, the important parts of this work are available in a Free form, one way or the other. We're using a build of Wine equivalent to WineHQ of about mid week last week, along with a few patches that haven't been committed yet. I've sent along a few more details to the Wine devel mailing list.
Cheers,
Jeremy
My 3D editor will have Google Earth export in the next couple of weeks.
I'm told it works on Wine but a native Linux version could happen anyway.
No sig today...
Wine has been at, what, "90% complete" for over a decade, or something? And it's still clunky and doesn't work most of the time.
I tried posting this from Chromium, but it wouldn't let me login. Guess they haven't implemented cookies yet. But what I wanted to post was that a nice feature request for a Wine application would be the ability to, I dunno, resize the window without my WM crashing.
I have some great hopes for Wine back in 1998, ut I all but gave up on it way back in 2005.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Dear dumbass,
You're a fucking idiot. Just login, set your preferences and when you want to post AC, just click the "Post Anonymously" check box.
Sincerely your lover, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
Of course this is all a useless exercise for the purposes for which Chrome would really be useful: running google apps. Without SSL support working in Wine, I can't even log in. Until SSL works, chrome under wine is a mere curiosity, and a wine technology demo as Codeweavers says.
It's slow, slow to redraw, the fonts run off the buttons, etc. Try using gmail, or using Slashdot's javascript commenting system, and you'll hate yourself. I'm glad I saw coworkers running it, and I've run it in virtualization -- otherwise I'd think Google Chrome sucks. I'm glad to see that CodeWeavers made some strides with it -- when I tried, I finally got it to run, but it wouldn't load any sites -- but it really is just a proof of concept. I hope that the native port picks up some steam.
Now I, a poor Linux user, can give Google my confidential business data, bank account details, medical information, personal preferences in pornography and DNA code! And it'll all be entirely confidential between me and their marketing department!
But they're still not evil. If they were evil, I'd have to search using Windows Live.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The problem with that is that the moderation of those posts are still taken into account. If you log on and post too many anonymous trolls within a certain period, then you may get the "You've posted too many times/posted too many low-scoring comments" warning and your account will be banned from posting for the day.
That's why I stopped compulsively posting Frist P$0t trolls(Unless the article has to do with Macs! ^_^ ).
At least on the URL bar. I just downloaded and tried out their Linux port and the font in the URL bar looks like ass.
Case in point: http://img140.imageshack.us/my.php?image=chromeox9.jpg
Ah well. I guess it'll give me something to play with until Google puts out an official Linux build.
And I just installed Chrome using Wine out of the box in half an hour, without any modifications. This seems rather underwhelming. OK, they did it from source.
Since I can't code my way out of a wet paper sack I would pay to have some changes made to Google's browser.
1. Use OS widgets/themes/colors. Apps should ALWAYS follow the OS UI!
2. Have a title bar that acts like a title bar.(goes with above)
3. Status bar. I want to see every URL before I click on it.
4. More options for javascript (like turn off 3rd party scripts)
5. Ability to turn off plugins and crap. (I hate flash!)
6. Remove Google crap (google updater, etc)
7. Add the ability to start chrome with last sessions tabs/windows
I'd pay say $50 (US Check) to the group. Now if we can get others on this band wagon, that can be some good cash!
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-os-x
It's like the trash in your collage apartment; let it start stinking first and then someone will take it out. I give it about three days.
It's like the trash in your college apartment. Let it start stinking first and then everyone will continue to ignore it until the neighbors complain of the flies.
I give it about 3 weeks.
There, fixed it for you.
Impetuous! Homeric!
From Teh OP:
Translation: it's free as in nobody in their right mind would pay for it.
As a Chrome port, it fails, according to CodeWeaver's fact itself.
As a proof of concept, it fails, since it is not FOSS.
As a proof of concept, it is scary because the last thing we need is google thinking they would get away with "porting" chrome picasa-like ...
As a WINE advert it is ok, well, almost mediocre.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
No good in Linux.
In just 1 day I had an Adventure: Colossal Caves port for Win16 running on Wine, by telling Wine to run it. Wine has come far when you don't need to make a whole dev team spend a week and a half fucking with it to make a single app work.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Offtopic, but at least one parent point deserved a response, imo.
If you make your browser more secure by turning off the highly exploitable javascript support that is required for the abrasively annoying AJAX to run ( turn off Flash support too for good measure ) then you will be presented with a link to view the page with the "classic discussion system". Click that and you will see the page in a way almost but not completely the way it was before the AJAX junk got added. It is still an infinitely better way to view the discussion then the AJAX is. That link should be an option though without either having to login or improving your security settings for the browser.
AC posts can be read in the AJAX format, even when not logged in, just have to expand the view annoyingly to do so with the floating nuisance on the side. At least it works for me when browsing from a hard driveless computer using a live cd, usually Mandrive Spring 2008 Live, to watch some video from elsewhere on the web, used it to catch some of the convention junk since no tv here. Safest way I could think of, with my limited knowledge, to allow javascript and Flash to run.
CmdrTaco, please add the link for "the classic discussion system" to the AJAX rendered pages to help avoid running off people with the abrasive AJAX.
Astounding how anyone would want to emulate Windows. Again, Codeweavers deliver another step backwards. As for Gooogle releasing a win version initially.... You've lost all respect.
As an AC even if you get +5's it is a while before you can post again.
I have the Windows version of Chrome installed in my .wine directory and have dabbled a bit with it to see if some websites I built render OK on it. Chrome under wine runs, albeit somewhat haphazardly - it crashes quite often and has abysmal font rendering (a Wine problem, really). For fun I just installed the Crossover version of Chromium and tried it. The experience between these two is very similar: it looks the same (except for the Google-branded coloring of the Windows-version vs. the unbranded coloring of the Crossover version), has the same font rendering problems, crashes frequently. This is of course to be expected but it raises the question of the value of a winelib 'port' vs. running the Windows binary using the wine runtime. I prefer the latter, as that does not give anyone the illusion that the winelib port should be seen as a viable 'native' port for Linux and Mac (I guess, but for lack of a Mac (and the lack of desire to get one) I can not state this with any type of authority). Wine can help in getting rid of Windows, but winelib does not help in getting rid of Windows-isms. Code ported with winelib still feels alien, and acts in ways which do not fit in. Linux (and Mac) are in many ways better than Windows, but not by being 'a better Windows'. In many cases they are better because they are not like Windows at all.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Package Chromium for Win2k!
Think about it when you stop laughing ;)
Too bad the proxy options dialog box doesn't work. You can't specify the proxy. This is typical of wine behavior for the past 11 years I have been using it. Things work but not 100% for the apps I use.
So ... in 11 days they managed to get it to run on another platform using a translation library that allows many Windows apps to just work under OS X and Linux.
An application whos core is already cross platform and runs on OS X and Linux without an API translator already ...
I'm sorry, whats the impressive part? Took me 2 hours to get it working in OS X, and that includes the time it took to install Windows on the VMware machine, wheres my cookie?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I'm impressed by the speed, but disappointed by certain basic features that were absent. (When I right click, I want REFRESH to show up in the context menu, otherwise your browser is useless to me.) And the quirks. Hopefully they'll get some of this ironed outt.
Free beer still tastes the same.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, aside from the fact WINE is NOT emulating, ever think you need to run an application that is ONLY available on Windows?
Happens all the time in business. You can rant and rave all you want about alternatives or boycotting, or demanding a *nix port, but the reality is you have your business to attend too.
Sure, still push for that alternative, but you still gotta be running TODAY, not someday, and WINE can often do that for you and still let you ditch Windows along the way..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Comment removed based on user account deletion
SO if Chrome is built on WebKit, and Safari is built on WebKit... where exactly does this take me?
-- NSY - SY OOT - Doric signs on local shop doors.
wow, chrome is cool, but NONETHELESS all in caps aligns really funny on this ported version. It almost looks like when you type LaTeX
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Hah. Well the OS X version looks pretty 'armpit' too; but luckily not as 'ass' as that in your specimen.
All creds to the CodeWeavers, tho.
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
You're looking at it wrong. Wine will not truly shine (I made a rhyme!) until developers start thinking of it as a tool for porting their programs to Linux/Mac OS X. For this, Mac and Linux markets becoming large enough is a natural and slightly lofty prerequisite. Wine itself only has to reach adequate compatibility status.
During porting, large studios will use Wine to simplify and speed up the job. Rather than changing their code to make it compatible with Wine deficiencies, it will make more sense to submit fixes back to WineHQ. When you get a 100 random studios doing this at once, Wine development will absolutely fly.
Until we hit that point, Wine will only be a good tech demo for most applications. There is no possible way to keep up with the Windows API realistically as is. There needs to be commercial muscle behind the project looking out for their own interests.
With Wine 1.0, I do personally think Wine has reached adequate compatibility status. I also think the Mac OS X market share surge is getting developers interested again in alternative platforms. Wine working on Mac OS X is delicious cake. Google using Wine for some of it's apps is actually a very very good sign....
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
$50 is not enough for your changes. You can open a ticket on Rentacoder.com if you really want to get those changes done and it would cost you between $150 and $2100 USD, depending on the level of quality. (and weather you got screwed)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I assume when you say Chrome is a "privacy killer" you have read the whole source or at least monitored network traffic while browsing.
Serious defenders of online privacy do exactly the latter by testing software on a honeypot behind a proxy, reading the proxy's log, and reporting the result on a blog.
I believe this is suppose to be funny, not flamebait.
Mine's a Macallan 12-year-old.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Since Chrome uses WebKit, couldn't you have just used Midori or some other Linux-native WebKit browser?
fuck wine
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
another thing for ubuntu users to bitch about
Your annoyance is misplaced.
The speech/beer convention was devised as a patch for a bug in the English language. One word, "free", has two distinct meanings. Normally people deal with these cases by using context ("Some atoms are ionized but most are unionized" vs. "Plumbers in many areas are unionized") but in this case both meanings are plausible. The two types are free are distinct, software could be free in either sense, yet English (unlike most other languages) gives us only one preferred word for both meanings.
This resulted in numerous exceedingly tedious flame wars that ended, if at all, with a lame "Oh, that's not what I thought you meant--why didn't you say so in the first place?"
Clarifying which homonym is intended right up front may annoy you, but trust me, it is far, far better than the alternative.
--MarkusQ
Chrome is a dead piece of shit.
I crawled the licenses page here [chromium.org] and I only found OSI approved open source licenses...
Don't do that, then!
Sure I could, but Chrome is not just Webkit. It is Webkit plus whatever Google did to it, with a different backend (skia) and a different javascript runtime. A browser is more than just the rendering engine...
--frank[at]unternet.org
Downloaded and installed it from Google when it was released right away... and now there's a background process trying to send data to google every few minutes. That would be the first thing that should have been removed on a port of Chrome to another platform.
well I had a go at it.
High score for ease of installation, a couple of clicks and it was there.
No import of Firefox bookmarks or history though - only IE. I thought that was strange; there's no IE on this machine [of course]. I logged in to gmail ok, but it wouldn't let me log in to ebaY. No way to print a selection, that I could see.
The killer for me, though, is on my system [AMD2800, 1G ram, Ubuntu8.04] it was way slower than Firefox. The processor was pinged at 100% or close to it all the time. And it wouldn't play Youtube vids - said I didn't have either flash or java. Strange, I have them both, and FF plays Youtube just fine.
I'm still trying to figure out where you get free beer.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Google Update can be used to download and install an application without any user intervention at all, by request of the webpage being viewed, using the undocumented "_GU_*()" calls in both IE and Firefox. The security model is not documented anywhere. And Google has declined to respond to questions about it.
It's not packaged if there's no yum/apt URL.