Slashdot Mirror
Chrome On the Way For Mac and Linux
TornCityVenz writes "I've seen many complaints in the feedback on Slashdot every time an article on Google's Chrome browser hits; the calls for true cross platform availability have struck me as a valid complaint. So now it seems Google is answering your calls, promising in this article on CNET a deadline for Mac and Linux support." I'd really like to not care about the name of the browser I'm using, but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.
Is this a sign of the apocalypse?
They've been promising Linux and Mac ports for Google Talk for several years. Still hasn't happened.
but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.
What's the big rush? I tried Linux several times before I finally dual booted, then went on later to make the switch. If Chrome offers some features you find compelling, there's no reason they can't share browsing duty.
A little competition is a good thing. Though I do have to say that opening up their platform for custom user extensions was a brilliant move by Mozilla.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I just don't understand why it is taking Google so long to release a Mac and Linux version. Can someone explain some of the technical issues that would cause such a delay? I"m just curious.
but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.
Unless I am grossly misinformed, I do not see how Firefox extensions could work at all on Chrome, let alone 'seamlessly'. A statement such as this essentially says "I will only use exactly what I have now"
Sorry, Timothy: it's doubtful you'll see out of the box compatibility with AdBlock for Chrome.
Why would a technology company that generates revenue from ads want to allow you to block the ads?
Slashdot's pretty greedy these days; there's ads in my RSS feed from Slashdot.
I ignore them.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
Having been checking out the incredibly high quality Google Chrome code and what it is doing it is understandable that there was going to be a delay for other platforms.
The reason Chrome is so much faster than other browsers - especially even after days of constant webbrowsing is all the platform specific work with memory protection and threading.
I've honestly been using the Chrome source code as a tremendous learning tool to get up to speed on how to write modern threaded application code.
The delay will be worth it when you get your hands on it. Switching to Chrome had that feeling of running your old apps on a new and faster computer. It just feels so smooth no matter how many tab or windows are open or how much Javascript is running in the background.
More or less a matter of market share I'd imagine. Google has wanted maximum exposure for its beta phase, which still means windows. For OS X, at least, the transition should be fairly simple(comparatively anyway) since Safari, like Google Chrome, is based around webkit. Which means its more about translating the shell of the browser.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
I may be very dumb but how do you download Chrome from the Chrome download page using Firefox 3.05 on (cough) windows xp? I only get a blue box with two non clickable text lines saying 'for windows vista/xp sp2' Something wrong with some weird setting on my pc?
Not sure if that was an intentional joke about Firefox or not.
But the horribly outdated single threaded Firefox Javascript makes just turning all instances off by default essentially a necessity.
Firefox is seriously screwed on the performance front. They would need to do a ground up rewrite like Google has with Chrome to implement a modern threading and memory protected implementation. And they've made it clear they have no intention of ever doing so.
Most embarrassing is the fact that Microsoft now has threading and memory protection. Perhaps that humiliation for the Firefox guys will finally motivate them to fix their archaic codebase.
They are doing a parallel development for Linux and Mac ? "Iterating to get the architecture right?" sheesh. If you wanna do crossplatform desktop software, you design for it from the get go and develop everything at the same time, not doing a rewrite or "parallel development" later on. ...
I havent looked at the chrome codebase, so maybe they have a clean interface layer there for opsys and rendering backend dependencies, so they are basically doing a port of these pieces now, but it seems like awfully long time for something so basic
We are now in a weird situation where Firefox made its name by ridiculing IE as being woefully outdated.
But now Google and Microsoft have put in the enormous effort to implement memory protection and threading for tabs leaving Firefox as the technological relic.
Even if Firefox started today working on trying to catch up to Chrome and IE it would certainly be a couple years before they did the bottom to top rewrite it would require.
Because nobody using Mac or Linux has ever switched from a different operating system.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
We already have a pretty decent, well supported Webkit powered browser with a reasonable userbase. I'm not really seeing google bringing anything new to the party.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
Will people stop making new browsers and just concentrate on fixing Flash? If that one problem plugin were replaced we would have much fewer problems with all of the browsers.
The article actually used phrases like "hopes to" and "wants to" regarding the release dates.
If Google promised specific release dates, I'd get really worried about quality, and about Google becoming a marketing-driven rather than engineering-driven organization.
As Blizzard has shown us, the "we'll release it when it's ready" policy correlates well with excellent products.
It's open source.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
"When they are good and ready, theyll do it and it will rock."
Sure if will. Oh god...
Given just what a fiasco something as simple as tracking down and fixing gigantic memory leaks was for the FF devs, 70 million or even 70 billion isn't going to do anything.
The FF devs solution for their horrendous memory leaks was to sit around in forums like pricks flaming anyone who dared complain about having to constantly quit out of FF to clear out the unused memory. It's not a memory leak, it's a feature you idiots!
Instead of getting their shit together they will most likely just do nothing and put out more silly cherry picked benchmarks and other bullshit to do damage control for how far behind technologically they've fallen.
Wake me when they have NoScript, AdBlock+/ElementHiderHelper, Repagination, ChickenFoot, FoxyProxy, RefControl, etc...
Google Chrome isnt exactly giving me a geek boner yet.
If they do OSX, its minor to get it to BSD.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Google doesn't have a strategic interest for Chrome on Linux or Mac, as there IE is nonexistent. Chrome was created specifically to fight against IE. And IE exists on Windows only.
So far, Google's tactical move has worked, by chipping almost 1 percent of marketshare from IE. Firefox users aren't going to switch to Chrome (in general) but some IE users will.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I'd really like to not care about the name of the browser I'm using, but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.
Is that coming from the same people that ask to switch to FFox from MSIE (or from Windows to Linux), even that could be some "essential" plugin/extra/program/whatever that wont work seamlessly in firefox?
At least there is an advantage in Firefox extensions: they are (most, at least) opensource. If Chrome have any way to be able to "plug" code from others (call it plugin, extension, addon, whatever) those essential firefox extensions could be ported, adapted or recoded to fit in the new browser, and with a bit of luck, with not very much effort over what is needed to port them to the next firefox version.
And that is not something that one must wait google (or the chrome developers community) to do. But they should provide the tools to enable others to do that.
People who want better Javascript performance than FireFox.
I think the question isn't so much when will Chrome be available for Mac and/or Linux... but rather who will actually use it on those platforms. Between the Apple fanatics not wanting to let go of Safari to the FSF fanatics who are gonna lay an egg over the non-GPL license I quite frankly don't see it becoming a very viable, or more to the point widely adopted, alternative to what people are already using on these platforms.
One of the reasons is that they are using something called "Windows Integrity Mechanism".
See mention at page 3 here.
Then read about the integrity mechanism here.
As usual, people who don't understand Python are doomed to repeat the "it's not fast enough" comment.
User interface widgets are extremely fast, even in Python. All that code does is wait for the user (and even the wait loop is down in C code), so there's no reason the GUI wrapper can't be written in Python regardless of what Google wants. The rendering and javascript engine is the thing that browsers bog down on, and the renderer is a bunch of C++ webkit code, and nobody is suggesting that be changed.
On the other hand, tkinter sucks, so why not write it in Python with GTK? (Or sure, QT 4 is good too.)
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Google bought Google Earth from Keyhole. I doubt their core teams use QT much.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
You would be correct if any of those (Pidgin, etc) would support video and voice (which they don't). It's been years since we have been promised at least voice support, but it isn't there. So, Pidgin and Co. can do IM just fine, but that is about it.
Agree with this 100%.
For some definition of "fight". The Firefox story has illustrated the power of the geeky community to put software on mom and dad's desktops. Firefox went from nothing to a 20-30% share (depending on who you ask). There's not nearly enough computer geeks in the world for us to hold 20% of the browser share ourselves, but nobody else would ever have heard about it if (a) we didn't all hate IE and (b) we didn't have family and friends to whom we could evangelize Firefox. (I guess the fullpage Times ad didn't hurt either, but the momentum already existed at that point.) I'll bet Google is aware of this effect, and is hoping to bring the geeks around, and use them to evangelize in the same way. It'll even be easier this time, because Firefox has softened the ground already by forcing people off of their default, and making them comfortable with the idea of switching browsers.
How do you appeal to geeks? Support the things geeks like: Linux, OS X, and extensions.
Another strategic reason is that Google is pushing into other non-Windows platforms; e.g. they want to be able to run this thing on Android-using hardware too. The browser there is already webkit-based; it might make sense to unify those codebases better, which is easier if it's already cross-platform.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Yes, I know I'm hopelessly behind the times with my *ancient* G4 mini, but if there's a group that needs a faster browser, it's us "obsolete computer users". Obsolete meaning the computer, not the user.
I know that x86 is the way forward, but I see more and more Intel-only apps that make me wonder what exactly prohibited the devs from making it a Universal Binary.
Microsofts Live Mesh comes to mind (I wanted to install it to compare it to Dropbox); not even a decent message stating that it was Intel-only, it just said that my device wasn't supported or something. Dropbox on Linux/PPC is another culprit, btw.
I'm hoping V8 gets ported to PPC as well, although I'm somewhat worried that it won't, since a JS interpreter sounds a bit more involved than a file syncing thingy.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
No one.
That's why I've had so much time to be able to study source code like Chrome's.
I've made millions in Cat Pornography and have the luxury of leisure time - although with a bit of guilt.
...I don't understand. Why name Chrome using the same word as something that has a specific technical meaning not just in regards to programs in general, but specifically to another popular web browser? It'd be like naming a program Folder or Library. There's no plausible way the Chrome developers were unaware of the other usage of the word, so did they just think it was a cool name and figure it wouldn't confuse most people? Or were they trying to specifically trade on the existing meaning of the word? It seems unlikely there's any malice behind it. I can't think of any other explanations, though surely there must be some.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
if you could properly spell, then maybe I would take you a bit more seriously..
Next time when writing English sentences, try to put verbs before their adverbs. Especially in light of your attempt at lecturing others on English linguistics. My single misspelling was intentional by the way. Now, here is a task for your cheap time - try to find it!
I've got enough browser options to choose from with WebKit, Gecko, Opera and IE options. I don't need a tie-in to Google by Google using WebKit.
How this f'n company became big is still a mystery.
It's true that Mozilla providing a default search engine is a service that search-engine companies find valuable. On the other hand, having a useful default search engine is also something that Mozilla's users find valuable, so Mozilla is constrained in how they can sell that particular service.
If Some Guy's Horrible Search That Doesn't Work offered Mozilla a bazillion dollars for placement as the default search engine, they would likely have to turn it down, if they wanted their users to not hate them.
Now Yahoo or Microsoft Live aren't quite Some Guy's Horrible Search, but they are different, and in many ways not quite as good, as the status quo Firefox users expect. Basically, people use and expect Google Search, and will be annoyed if they don't get it. That means that if Google were so inclined, they could probably drive a hard bargain and reduce the amount they're paying for default-search placement, and Mozilla would likely grudgingly go along with it. At the very least, I would imagine that Microsoft or Yahoo would have to offer a considerable premium over Google's offer to make it worth the negative reactions of switching to them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
is that it keeps ppl on MS platform. As long as that happens, Google will be fighting a SLOW DEATH. If they can take the battle to a different yard, at least it is fair.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What's the big difference in IPC? I mean... shared memory is shared memory.
Let's say you write a message queue. You think "welp, my cpu has a 32 bit word so it can probably write a 32 bit word in one cycle :D," stick a volatile in front of it and you think you're done. Then you get odd bugs.
So you read up on your CPU and discover that it's only possible to read or write a 32 bit word in one cycle if the word is on an 8-byte boundary. So you manually specify alignment and the problem seems to go away. Then you get odd bugs.
So you read up more on your CPU, bang your head against your desk and read some more. Eventually you'll remember that your CPU thinks it's much smarter than you are and it's reordering your read and write instructions. So you add a memory barrier and the problem seems to go away. Then you get odd bugs.
Occasionally you get duplicates of old messages or corruption. So you repeat the above steps and finally learn that your CPU has decided it's much smarter than you are, and it has decided that it's better to update the read pointer in your message queue before the memory you're writing to the queue finishes leaving the L1 cache.
Yes, indeed, shared memory is shared memory. I have no idea why Google might be taking a long time to port their multithreaded Windows applications to Linux and OSX which run on several different and totally alien architectures.
It is not just good enough to have a none IE browser. They NEED to move the customers OFF of windows. If YOU do not understand that, then nobody can help you.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I agree in general but...
I can think of ways to integrate Yahoo. For example for any website do a reverse yahoo topic lookup and have an "also on this topic" button.
For Microsoft its a little harder since they essentially offer Google but worse. OTOH Microsoft search is skinable so Firefox could throw their own ads on top. Or they could offer topical ads like A9 used to do (which used to be my default engine).
I miss Google Browser Sync.
And now I use Foxmarks in Firefox, I got it back.
But, since Firefox crashes a hell of a lot I went to Chrome.. but, now I'm missing that feature again.
Why oh why oh why can't this be something all browsers do? Microsoft will probably have a Live Sync/Mesh thing and Firefox has Foxmarks, and Weave (sigh) and I think Opera has a service too, but Chrome.. while pretty damn excellent, and fast, just has no plugin stuff like this and it doesn't look like it will have.
I guess someone could write a Foxmarks-compatible plugin for it. That would be awesome. Then I can share my bookmarks across ALL my systems and ALL my browsers (Firefox and Chrome basically, and only Firefox because of the lack of Chrome for Linux, but if the Linux versions appears.. this is the thing that makes me not want to switch..)
So Google writes Windows specific code then plans on getting it to run on other platforms? Sounds like a real winner to me. I'll stick with Firefox until something better (IMO) comes along.
It would be extremely irksome if Google used the winelibs to accomplish this. That is a complete copout for not wanting to write a real cross platform program.
Well - as allways - Apple has lead the way here: There is single password storage for all applications on a Mac OS X system. And it is synconised via MobileME. So basicliy precisly what you want.
But of course Opera, Thunderbird and Firefox just ignore the system password storrage and bring there own. Heck - not even Thunderbird and Fixefox share the same password storrage - how stupid. And sync via extra plugin - all wrong.
Will Chrome do it better? I don't think so.
Talking about not caring about the name of a browser, I'm still offended that they went for a name directly from Mozilla's codebase, chrome. They read a page from Microsoft it seems.
But... the future refused to change.
The default search page of Mozilla Firefox in Japan, is Yahoo.jp (owned by sofbank)
Just some random info.
Mu
As a quad g5 owner I would totally agree.
(when file beeing sent is a picture, it shows a preview in IM windows on both sides)
And while I can understand that nerds of all kind don't crave for voice & video, I can't understand why nobody implemented this "picture IM" functionality in any of the big Jabber clients...few of my anime-addicted buddies can't live without it. At least for one of them it's the only reason why Linux is out of the question.
And...similar for me, though I'd need full Gtalk equivalent (or at least...I prefer to think that I'll need it again ;p )
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'll throw this in before some Firefox fanboy gets in with the usual "but in Opera it's only manual"...
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/
Works at least as good as AdBlock + any proper list, light (no extension needed after all/uses build-in Opera features) and leaves almost no empty spaces.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Google's new, feature weak browser that runs on Windows only. Ohh, wow, so they'll release it on Linux and MacOS now, sweet!
I really could care less. Once Firefox was released I switched to that and have found absolutely no compelling reason to use anything else. Not IE7, not Opera, not Chrome.
It's pretty obvious that Google wants a new browser that they can implement their own extensions and such on so they can deliver better web applications to your desktop. It really sounds just like Internet Explorer all over again.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I'd really like to not care about the name of the browser I'm using, but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.
And we are wondering why so many people refuse to switch from Windows.... "...someone used to particular Windows extensions (i.e. applications), unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Linux/OSX/BSD."
Firefox and OpenOffice are using cross-platform components (non-native outside Windows). That's why they are unusable slow in OS X and Linux. E.g. starting Firefox takes easily 5 secs on my MBP dual core with 4 gigs or RAM, while Safari starts in less than a second. Only reason I run Firefox as a secondary browser (when doing webdev work) is Firebug, although Web Inspector in Safari Nightly Build is almost as good.
Well, I see we play in a different leage. I might mention that I pay ~ â40 a month so I can watch TV without advertising.
Because that is where it comes down to: Nothing is free - you just might not notice the hidden cost at the first glance.
Same goes for Apple and OS X. There the price is in the open. You pay and have a system which works a lot better then Windows. Even Office:MAC 2008 is better then Office 2008. Because those features which you pay for every 18 month are usefull.
But in the end it is your decision how much you value your qualtity time.
I've played around with Chrome on a couple Windows boxes on work (before the nazis downstairs blocked everything but google's search, so we can't do anything but search google--not even click on the links or check gmail--in a web browser), and have even played with Crossover Chromium. But that's really not enough for me to get my general impression of it, at all.
This is mainly because of one reason: it took more than that for me to figure out what I do and don't like about firefox, opera, ie, etc. IE, it just took some web development experience and seeing that it screwed a lot of stuff up that almost every other browser I tried at the time was doing correct. Of course, that's supposed to be improving.
Opera got my next vote after that. But I got to a point where, if I had a significant number of tabs open, it would freeze or just die almost every day. And I still have those problems with Opera today, though it's leant more towards the just dieing versus the freezing up in more recent versions, at least for me. Of course, that's what I'm using at the moment, just because it's better than the alternatives for my given situation--same reason I'm using OpenBox as my window manager at the moment: it's (more) stable, fast, and light, compared to anything else offering just what I need at the moment. I'm working on some development projects that makes any compisiting window manager I've tried other than OpenBox with xcompmgr weep and cry (even Fluxbox and xcompmgr doesn't work as expected always, not even compositing windows properly some times--but that's another subject).
Firefox, though. I usually have to close out of it and wait a minute or a few if I'm doing a lot of browsing in some more complex web pages (the exception is that Flash seems to do this to every browser I have ever tried it with in recent times). I still question if it's Firefox just not cleaning up the 600MB of RAM it collects after a while or really crappy web page design making Firefox choke--they're both completely believable to me--but when my entire system starts slowing down, only to go back to "normal" speed by closing Firefox and watching 600MB of RAM disappear, there's something wrong somewhere. And with only 1000MB, starting out with about 300MB before starting Firefox, 600MB used by Firefox makes me want to cry. I've tried shutting off all of the plugins and add-ons, but it's still the same. And especially when I'm doing programming and compiling nice sized projects, that's 600MB I don't want to have sitting around. And closing it out when I have multiple pages open for reference purposes is a large inconvenience, which points back at my problem with Opera, as well.
Of course, then there's Konqueror, and some others, but there's a good number of web pages I use frequently that Konqueror and a few others choke all over and spit out something that looks nothing like correct, while the others above get it at least right enough to use.
But as for Chrome. This is why I'm actually really interested in Chrome for Linux, personally. I don't have too much care for it replacing Firefox or Opera or any others, really. But a browser that's nice to have open for reference purposes during my programming would be nice. Currently, I don't have one at all. I make do with Firefox or Opera and occasionally Konqueror or whatever's floating my boat--yeah, even lynx, because you can't go much more light than that while retaining the quick just look and go for referencing, but then you miss some stuff too, which for reference purposes isn't too bad, especially if I go and use a terminal with tabs.
That's what I'm looking at for Chrome, or any browser, myself. When I'm in my OpenBox environment for development (I'll admit it: otherwise, I'm usually in KDE4 with either the beta KWin with the desktop cube or using Compiz-Fuzion, both of which have enough bugs that I expose with my programming to make me want to cry, because it makes debugging my code a pain in the ass), I tend to turn off everything but what I absolutely need in th
On the other hand, having a useful default search engine is also something that Mozilla's users find valuable, so Mozilla is constrained in how they can sell that particular service.
No. It is more work deleting the defaults they provide. It saves me no time. It wastes it. Much like prefilling my links folder - hate that - they never get a page I want. Even if they managed to get a page I want, the title and location are likely to be off.
Actually, the cost of upgrading Firefox, for someone who uses extensions, can be very high. I wish Firefox would norify you of extension conflicts BEFORE you upgrade, rather than just telling you they won't work, after.
Stainless (multi-process browser) + WebKit Nightly frameworks (SquirrelFish Extreme) = a decent preview of Chrome on OS X