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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.
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?
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
I just don't understand why it is taking Google so long to release a Mac and Linux version.
Well, according to this they used Windows' own HTTP protocol implementation for the first version - they've now written their own.
I suspect that Google are less concerned about taking marketshare from Safari (Mac) and Firefox (linux) than they are about getting established on Windows. Methinks their priority is to ensure that there is a Google-branded alternative to IE they can use as a web app platform just in case Microsoft does something to break Google Docs on IE (inadvertantly of course - no company with Microsoft's reputation would stoop to telling their developers that "IE9 ain't done until Gmail won't run"...)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
GUI programming and inter-process communication are vastly different on Windows than Linux/Mac; a lot of their code for Chrome was to make the existing code (WebKit) work with this design, but a lot of the rest was code that has to be completely rewritten - and chances are, a lot of the code that they wrote that they can keep needs to be updated to work on more than just Windows as well.
No two operating systems are exactly the same, from the programmer's perspective. The available operating system interfaces for everything from file access to network interface control can be very different. Not just the names of library functions, but how the needed functionality is divided into operations. It turns out that the major division in widely used desktop OSes right now is between Windows (does everything its own way) and everyone else (does everything the UNIX way). It's not to say there aren't many consequential and subtle differences between UNIX variants (among which are Linux, OSX, and the many BSDs), but if you make it your first priority to support the most widely used OS, Windows, then it could be a while before you get around to Linux and OSX. Whereas if you made one of the UNIX-like OSes your first priority, the rest of those would probably follow more quickly than the Windows version.
I don't have any firsthand knowledge of how Google develops software, but in general terms this is why you might not get the Windows version and the OSX/Linux versions all at the same time.
Wake me when they have NoScript, AdBlock+/ElementHiderHelper, Repagination, ChickenFoot, FoxyProxy, RefControl, etc...
I think Google is a better strategist than you are giving them credit to. Google doesn't give a shit whether there is Chrome on Mac or Linux, because those platforms are covered by Firefox and other non-Explorer browsers, and Google is fine with that. Google even sponsors Firefox, by the tune of millions of dollars.
Google has one goal in mind: increase the non-IE marketshare. IE only exists on Windows, hence Chrome only needs to be able to fight on that platform.
Now, if you don't even understand why Google needs to increase the non-IE marketshare, I can't help you.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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.
Who needs the Google Talk IM client when its an open API and you can use Pidgin or Adium?
Because Google projects are usually side-projects that the developers work on with part of their time as a 'fun' project.
The developer that chose to do this was probably just having fun and didn't really expect it to be picked as one of the ideas that gets launched to users. So he did it however he wanted.
Now that it's a big project, it's being fixed.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Because they want Chrome to be fast. While python is fast for a scripting language, it is not up to the task of delivering the fastest browser known to man.
If I were Google (that is a great sentence) I would base it on QT 4. Fast, customizable, cross-platform, modern and integrated with WebKit.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Ah, I forgot about something. Not just the JavaScript engine is probably win32 specific, but Chrome also relies heavily on inter-process communication (since each tab in each window has its own process).
I'm betting good money that this is very hard to do properly cross-platform.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Replaced with what? Silverlight?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Until their machine comes with Chrome bundled as the default browser - that's the end game Google are aiming for here.
Then you'll see IE user-share decline rapidly.
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.
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.
They have a goal to sell their online Office suite and other apps and services, almost all of which are accessed via the browser. What would happen if the next version of I.E. broke some of their apps? They can't afford to be at anybody's mercy.
Actually, I don't think this was a 20% project. Chrome had a team of engineers working on it, and at its core it has the V8 Javascript engine. You don't just wake up one day and say "Hey, why don't I write an optimized Javascript engine from scratch!" This is a project that fits in with Google's strategic vision, and it had the necessary manpower allocated to it.
It's XMPP with custom extensions to support voice, and possibly other features as well. From the horse's mouth:
They wrote a Windows wrapper around cross platform libraries.
No, you've inverted it, they wrote a "cross platform layer" that currently only has a Windows libraries based implementation:
Chrome uses abstraction libraries to draw the GUI on other non-Windows platforms, but for now, what sits underneath part of ChromeViews is good ol' WTL.
(from Scott Hanselman's analysis of the Chrome code)
This indicates that Google did have multiplatform support in mind from the beginning. If they hadn't used native Windows libs for the GUI, I'm pretty certain we'd be hearing just as much bitching about how cross platform libs never perform as solidly as native ones.
Then they had the nerve to deny it, even when anybody who looked at the source code immediately after initial release could see the truth of the matter.
Citation, please.
ah, but my 15 extensions worth of bloat is quite different to yours (except for noscript and addblock, probably). Since we both just get the features we want, is it rely bloat, which tends to be defined as extraneous and vaguely useful features that have been hanging around for a while.
Just because you use the "beta" version of their software doesn't mean that there's not a release available -- it just doesn't have the same features. Google does have paid for services in addition to the free ones, or didn't you know that?
Put identity in the browser.