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Harsh Words From Google On Linux Development

Posted by timothy on from the constructive-criticism dept.

jeevesbond writes "The alpha version of Google Chrome is now available for GNU/Linux. Google Chrome developer and former Firefox lead Ben Goodger has some problems with the platform though. His complaints range from the lack of a standardised UI toolkit, inconsistencies across applications, the lack of a unified and comprehensive HIG, to GTK not being a very compelling toolkit. With Adobe getting twitchy about the glibc fork and previously describing the various audio systems as welcome to the jungle, is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?"

1 of 948 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's been time for YEARS by Peter+La+Casse · · Score: 1, Redundant

    In the context of the story, the issue at hand is that Google is being pressured by "the Linux community" to develop a version of their browser "for Linux". If your Debian desktop is different than my Fedora desktop, then we can't both run Chrome. Either Google targets Fedora, or Debian, or OpenBSD, or, or or...

    If the code base is already cross-platform, then the idiosyncrasies of different Linux distributions are minor; making it run on Debian and Fedora is much easier than making it run on Windows and MacOS. A variety of fine cross platform toolkits and languages exist. Yes, when distributing binaries one must target not only a specific distribution, but a specific release and a specific CPU architecture as well. The easy way out is to not do just that: if you release source packages for Debian and Fedora (whose package managers include automatic dependency resolution), the eager beavers behind other distributions will do the rest of the heavy lifting for you. Or at least, they will for Google.