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CodeWeavers Package Google Chrome For Linux and Mac

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the not-to-be-forgotten dept.

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."

32 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Predictable, Really. by mfh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Predictable, Really. by gardyloo · · Score: 5, Funny

      free as in beer
      but not free as in speech

      What of free from fear
      Of corporate over-reach?

      Yeah! Opera gives you corporate reach-around!

    2. Re:Predictable, Really. by gerardolm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I assume when you say Chrome is a "privacy killer" you have read the whole source or at least monitored network traffic while browsing. Or maybe you are pulling it all out of your Google-hating er... parts.

    3. Re:Predictable, Really. by hentaidan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Mac and Linux users should reject Windows applications and games. If they can't, they should question their OS of choice.

      Why should anyone restrict themselves to native applications when they don't have to?

      Ever heard of the best of both worlds?

    4. Re:Predictable, Really. by Jamil+Karim · · Score: 3, Funny

      Ever heard of the best of both worlds?

      Of course! That's one of my favorite episodes... :-P

    5. Re:Predictable, Really. by plover · · Score: 5, Insightful

      free as in beer but not free as in speech

      What of free from fear Of corporate over-reach?

      I'm getting pretty sick of the whole "drunk as in beer, not as in scotch" disclaimer crap. Everything has its limits, and petty squabbles about "mine is freer than yours" serve only to enrage a flock of wannabe first amendment lawyers. They fill the blog'O'sphere with masturbatory rants about "you published your peanut butter without my chocolate disclaimer!"

      Can't we find something better to squabble endlessly about? Like why Firefox's spell checker didn't complain about the word "masturbatory"?

      --
      John
    6. Re:Predictable, Really. by jorx · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Mac and Linux users should reject Windows applications and games. If they can't, they should question their OS of choice.

      You're joking right?

    7. Re:Predictable, Really. by GigaplexNZ · · Score: 3, Informative

      Windows shares BSD roots with it's TCP/IP stack.

      That used to be true. The Vista one is all new code.

  2. Yeah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Giving Google all your data is not just for Windows users anymore!

  3. Native port? by carrett · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  4. Google Earth is native! by dkegel · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dangit, I wish people would stop spreading the false meme that Google Earth has anything to do with Wine! It's native!

    1. Re:Google Earth is native! by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What I'd like to know is why .kml/.kmz files created by Google Earth are incompatible with Google Maps.

    2. Re:Google Earth is native! by david@ecsd.com · · Score: 4, Informative
      It may be native, but it still looks like wine. I can't understand why, since it's compiled against QT, that it can't pick up my widget styles.

      At least then it'd feel native.

  5. In Just 11 Days by Rie+Beam · · Score: 5, Funny

    '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?

    1. Re:In Just 11 Days by just_another_sean · · Score: 3, Funny

      '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?

      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.

      --
      Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
  6. Please help with the port by dkegel · · Score: 5, Informative

    If anyone has some free cycles, please come help get the Linux port going. There's lots to do. See http://dev.chromium.org/

    1. Re:Please help with the port by Ilgaz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Does Linux users, especially the newbies who just comes from Windows land need such a potential privacy killer?

      They moved to Linux because their Windows became impossible to use since they kept not reading EULAs and leaving "default options" checked.

    2. Re:Please help with the port by MacJedi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is a non-issue. It's open-source, after all. Just remove or disable the parts that you find objectionable.

      --
      2^5
  7. All the vendors wave your hands in the air and say by TheModelEskimo · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  8. Re:For those of you using Firefox on linux.... by nawcom · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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/

  9. First impressions by wigaloo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:it is a remarkable achievement by Rie+Beam · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now, 12, that's just pushing it. And 10 would have been unrealistic.

  11. The Internet... by david@ecsd.com · · Score: 5, Funny
    My God...

    ... It's full of ads!

  12. Re:TANSFAAFB! by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Funny

    Your acronym is wrong. 'Thing' does not start with F.

    It does if you've been drinking.

    --
    This guy's the limit!
  13. Won't you take me.... to crappytown? by Arkham · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Won't you take me.... to crappytown? by multipartmixed · · Score: 4, Interesting

      > I suspect that's par for the course for a Wine-ported app

      Wine apps are/can be much better than that on Leopard. I only have one data point, but I use it _extensively_ and it works super-well. And stably. And actually, maybe even better than on Windows.

      The app? ies4osx under Darwine. Specifically, I am running Internet Explorer 6.0 for web-dev testing.

      The ONLY complaint I have is that it's under the "X" program, instead of it's own program, so I can't cmd-tab to it effectively. Web I'm doing web-dev, I also run Xemacs, so I have to ctrl-tab to get to IE, then cmd-tab to get to Safari and Firefox.

      And it's such a small complaint that I haven't even googled for a solution yet.

      --

      Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
  14. It's a hack! by feranick · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  15. More technical details by jeremy_white · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  16. Re:For those of you using Firefox on linux.... by jeremy_white · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  17. The Fonts on Linux Suck by Ian+Alexander · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  18. Re:"just" 11 days? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, like a lot of
    Windows apps Chrome does some, uh, interesting things that you might not expect a them to do :) 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).

    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.

  19. Your annoyance is misplaced. by MarkusQ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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