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Google Announces Chrome For Mac and Linux Dev Builds

Dan Kegel (who admits to being a Chrome developer) writes to point out a post from Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg, Product Managers for Google Chrome, with some good news for non-Windows users who want to play with Chrome: "In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux (for a couple of different Linux distributions), but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software." (The announcement continues below.) "How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won't yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.

Meanwhile, we'll get back to trying to get Google Chrome on these platforms stable enough for a beta release as soon as possible ..."
The downloads are available through the Chrome developer's channel.

5 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. How does this differ? by acb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How does this differ from the Chromium daily builds? Is it identical only officially a Google product, or are there technical differences?

  2. Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :) by EvilIdler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yeah, bookmarks work pretty well for 50+ new forum threads that didn't exist on your last visit :)

    I browse forums by clicking "New posts", then middle-clicking all the interesting threads. Close thread list, read each tab in order. If the wi-fi goes down, I still have lots to read right in front of me.

  3. Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And how it doesn't suck then? I'd say that Safari and Chrome are comparable.

    Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward. It has real sandboxing of tabs so that one tab can't make the others unresponsive or take down the browser is a huge leap forward. With the Web being so central to most people's workflow these days this is akin to the move to a multitasking OS. I think that's what has most of us excited, not speed or new features at this point. It has a long way to go, but the underlying architectural decisions provide for more potential.

  4. Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx by swimin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No its not.
    Was IE released for WINE? No.
    Was Safari released for Windows? Yes.

  5. Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx by Brandee07 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward. It has real sandboxing of tabs so that one tab can't make the others unresponsive or take down the browser is a huge leap forward. With the Web being so central to most people's workflow these days this is akin to the move to a multitasking OS. I think that's what has most of us excited, not speed or new features at this point. It has a long way to go, but the underlying architectural decisions provide for more potential.

    I know they advertise this, but it honestly hasn't proven to be true. I've been using Chrome daily since it came out (less bloat than Firefox, less suck than IE), and when a tab freezes, they all freeze.