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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.
Giving Google all your data is not just for Windows users anymore!
There ain't no such thing as a free beer!
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!
'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/
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.
Doesn't work for me. "wine ChromeSetup.exe" gives
fixme:advapi:CheckTokenMembership ((nil) 0x12a078 0x33f930) stub! fixme:process:SetProcessShutdownParameters (00000280, 00000001): partial stub. fixme:ole:CoInitializeSecurity ((nil),-1,(nil),(nil),6,2,(nil),64,(nil)) - stub! fixme:winhttp:WinHttpOpen ((null), 1, (null), (null), 0x0): stub
Good for Crossover!
How 'bout you actually try the Crossover packages then like you were supposed to? http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/
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.
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 :)
Now, 12, that's just pushing it. And 10 would have been unrealistic.
That said, the wine community in general did contribute a lot to this, too.
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.
"Yup, works for me, I'm using it right now. And fast enough, sure. But I'll need all the functionality of my Firefox Add-Ons before I'd consider switching..."
Is the gist of what I'd written, before I hit 'Submit', and it crashed (Taking my internet connection, requiring a restart!).
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
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
I just posted the tips to get all of the relevant sauce . And, as another poster reports, it's been running fairly well with Wine for at least 9 days; it just took us a bit longer to get https working properly.
Cheers,
Jeremy
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.
Wine 1.1.3, it sorta worked in a crashy sorta way. Wine 1.1.4, it installed and mostly worked except SSL. I expect a fully working Chrome in Wine 1.1.5 or 1.1.6. Here's to fortnightly releases!
Really, I'm amazed just how good Wine is these days - and when it isn't yet, how easy it is to add support for a new whizbang app when you really need to.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Is there anything that you would want to use chrome for? I think firefox ( or iceweasel if you are so inclined) does, or has plugins that do everything you listed. So someone who wants those features could pay some company to modify Chrome, or they could just download a working version for free. Anyone want to take any guesses as to which is more likely to happen?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Well, like a lot of :) For instance it does all the multi-process and security stuff. But then it also does what a lot of Windows programs do these days and replace the standard window management stuff as well. It relies on parts of Internet Explorer as well (like the HTTP library).
Windows apps Chrome does some, uh, interesting things that you might not expect a them to do
If you want an example of the sort of fun they had making things work, the bug this patch fixes was "Chrome URL bar has a black background" yet the fix is to the low level assembly generated by Wines build process. That's because Chrome shims BeginPaint/EndPaint by patching the in-memory system DLL headers, so it can muck about with the Windows richedit control internals and the Chrome IAT patcher didn't support Borland style imports.
For a program that has such complicated interactions with the OS, and is so heavily reliant on it for functionality, 11 days is remarkably good actually. A good sign of Wines increasing maturity.
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 ----
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.
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.
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