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.

Comments

Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[The Nipponese]

Why would I need this? I already have a webkit browser with tabs on top.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[Jugalator]

But they aren't... SEPARATED INTO PROCESSES!

OK, seriously and drama aside, I do think that's a good idea, and it also seem to help as a way to help out with memory management. I always thought Safari sucked a lot of RAM, especially on Windows.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[arodland]

Why would I need this? I already have a webkit browser with tabs on top.

Because you want one that doesn't suck.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[TitusC3v5]

Why would I need this? I already have a webkit browser with tabs on top.

Because multiple players means competition, and competition means innovation, which leads to a better browsing experience for all of us, regardless of which you're using.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[Anonymous Coward]

Webkit + tabs on top. Those are the only important factors to you? No wonder you bought a Mac.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[Jurily]

Because you want one that doesn't suck.

And that would be the one that doesn't let you change the (marketing dept. approved I presume) privacy settings and search engine?

I smell a rat.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[Antique Geekmeister]

Most of us have suffered quite enough from "innovation" in web browsers, thank you very much.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[poetmatt]

Really, an alpha build is expected to be considered a finished product? They never said we won't let you change privacy settings/search engine, it's called "we haven't even bothered coding features because this isn't stable".

If your ass smells like rats, that explains where your head is.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[isama]

I think parent means safari.. (captain obvious to the rescue!)

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[ThePhilips]

And how it doesn't suck then?

I'd say that Safari and Chrome are comparable. But setting speed aside, Chrome 2.0 really felt more like 0.2 when compared to FireFox. Long list of missing features, blatantly non-existent integration with Google own on-line applications...

I understand the enthusiasm about faster surfing (Chrome is about only browser which can render /. new layout in near real time), but otherwise they have quite long way before minimalist's feature parity.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[Cowmonaut]

Imposter! You are not Captain Obvious because he would of taken *context* and *tone* into account. He was replying to a humorous counter-point to the pro-Safari poster in a manner which indicates he was in support of Safari. This much is obvious to most English readers (most because, apparently, you are one of the few exceptions).

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Opera user, I haven't suffered at all from all of the innovation.

Also notice that I did not need to put the word innovation in quotes.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[cbhacking]

Avoiding software monoculture. On both OS X and Windows, Safari has been shown to have a substantial number of security flaws. Even if I liked its minimal configurability and general look and feel (I don't, but that's a personal thing) the security issues would lead me to avoid using it, much like IE6. (Hmm... is this some kind of rite of passage for a browser bundled with an OS? I hope Apple gets its security act in gear faster than Microsoft did - they're starting to become popular enough to be a worthwhile target.)

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I've never really understood how it could help with memory management - because now in addition to the memory you'd consume to load each page, you have additional overhead for each instance of the executable. It would seem, then, that viewing the same number of pages in distinct processes vs within the same process would use more memory. The additional overhead I'm referring to isn't the memory used by the code itself - obviously that's loaded just once - but instead it's all the dynamic initialization and allocations performed by that code. Am I missing something?

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[ystar]

It would seem, then, that viewing the same number of pages in distinct processes vs within the same process would use more memory.

This is true, but perhaps chrome uses some clever copy-on-write VM technology? Or (gasp) perhaps windows does? Any VM guys want to comment?

But the GP's claimed memory management benefits come from the ability to find pages that cause memory leaks somehow and close their processes, I believe. No idea how well it works in practice, but when I have ventured into windows and used chrome in the past, closing down lots of tabs would indeed free up lots of memory, for sufficient quantities of lots, and it did seem to exhibit far more aggressive reductions than firefox.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[everynerd]

Mod parent insightful. Safari is a glossy, bloated nightmare.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[VisceralLogic]

But they aren't... SEPARATED INTO PROCESSES!

Check out Stainless for Leopard... it's still lacking a few features, but it's coming together quite well.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[jcwayne]

<Steve Erwin impression>...and here we have one of the rarest of all specimens: the +1 Flamebait </Steve Erwin impression>

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[selven]

I always thought Safari sucked a lot of RAM, especially on Windows.

That's like saying "IE sucks, especially on WINE".

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[swimin]

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

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[Brandee07]

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.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[Guspaz]

But that's kind of the point. Finally, we can severely reduce memory bloat due to memory fragmentation by separating tabs into different processes.

Chrome has a higher memory footprint at first, but then as Firefox continues to use more and more RAM, Chrome's memory usage remains consistent.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[bonch]

With the Web being so central to most people's workflow these days this is akin to the move to a multitasking OS.

Awesome, we've finally achieved what we had decades ago in native apps. Next you'll tell me we'll get native ways to play video (HTML5) and the ability to update views on the fly (AJAX). My brain can't handle such futuristic features!

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Awesome, we've finally achieved what we had decades ago in native apps.

That's what happens when you have such a broken market. The desktop OS market is broken and stagnates. People try to work around it and MS tries to stop them by crippling the Web as well. The real solution is to get rid of MS's monopoly, but in the mean time, we'll see things like this as ways the market tries to make money by moving the state of the art forward.

Example, decades have passed and we still can't use spellchecking in all applications on Windows, at least with Web applications we can do that in most of them.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[LeonN]

and anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering!!!

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[BrokenHalo]

Check out Stainless for Leopard...

I don't think so. Everybody's lost interest. Chrome might have been interesting if Google had bothered to include the rest of the community from the start, but it's too late now.

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[Goaway]

Who do you think you're talking for here, exactly?

Re:Already have Safari, kbyethnx

[GWBasic]

Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward.

The ability to move tabs into different windows is what got me hooked. The separate process thing is nice, but when I'm on my Macs, I really miss the ability to move tabs into different windows.

Wha...?

[pHus10n]

Quote: "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."

What the hell did they release? A box of crayons where you have to draw the Internet manually? :)

Re:Wha...?

[noundi]

Before commenting on OSS development process you could, I don't know, do something as wild and crazy as perhaps READING how it's usually done. If you would have used your eyes before your itchy fingers you'd understand that OSS development is more often done behind open doors. Naturally the project has to start somewhere, right? Or did you think the stork delivered software as well?

Re:Wha...?

[pHus10n]

Wow.
Before commenting on Slashdot forum posts you could, I don't know, do something as wild and crazy as perhaps READING about how sarcasm is usually done. If you would have used your eyes before your itchy fingers you'd understand that a sarcastic post is more often done out in the open. Naturally the sarcasm has to start somewhere, right? Or did you think that the stork delivered your sense-of-humor as well?
My original post wasn't a radical post against OSS (though I question whether your's was).

Re:Wha...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh

Re:Wha...?

[SchizoStatic]

I was waiting for a car analogy.

Re:Wha...?

[Anonymous Coward]

A box of crayons where you have to draw the Internet manually?

Why, that is a fantastic idea!!
brb, making Internet Etch-a-Sketch.

Re:Wha...?

[mallumax]

I have been following chrome for mac development closely on my blog with weekly updates. Here is a list of the functionality as of Build 17426
What Works

* Almost All Websites
* Bookmark pages
* Most visited sites
* Open link in new tab
* Open new tabs
* Omnibox
* Back, Forward, Reload
* Open link in new window
* Drag a tab to make a window
* Launch new tab
* Cut, Copy, Paste
* Keyboard shortcuts
* about:version, about:dns, about:crash, about:histograms
* Find in page
* History with search
* Form Fill
* Delete Thumbnail in New Tab Page
* Window Positions Remembered
* View Source with synatx highlighting and clickable links

What Doesn't Work

* Plugins (No flash -> No youtube)
* Bookmarks Bar
* Print
* about:network, about:memory
* Web Inspector
* Input methods such as Kotoeri (Japanese)
* Preferences (Partial implementation)
* Full Screen Browsing
* Favicon (thanks brin)

Re:Wha...?

[Jurily]

I was waiting for a car analogy.

Here you go.

Re:Wha...?

[Eighty7]

Also the linux version doesn't have sandboxing

Unlike the Mac version. I'm sure they'd appreciate hints on how to use SELinux/AppArmor.

Re:Wha...?

[Bluesman]

I'm not current on development for the Mac, but I've heard that multiple processes can't share a single window in OS/X.

Do you happen to know how Chrome works around this, or is this not an actual limitation?

Re:Wha...?

[IBBoard]

What Doesn't Work

* Plugins (No flash -> No youtube)

Hurrah! They've implemented an even more effective Flash stopper than FlashBlock :) Now if only they had generic RPMs for it for us Fedora/openSuse/other users.

Re:Wha...?

[mallumax]

I'm not current on development for the Mac, but I've heard that multiple processes can't share a single window in OS/X.

Do you happen to know how Chrome works around this, or is this not an actual limitation?

I'm not a mac dev and what i'm posting here is gleaned from several svn log entries. So it might be wrong and inaccurate :). The chrome architecture is that there is a main process which handles the UI and there is one process per site which is launched but do not handle the UI. In Mac, the one process per site works but if you open up Activity Monitor you will see that the additional processes are shown as "Not responding" though in reality they are.

What is happening here is that OS-X expects the additional processes to respond to UI events and since they don't mark them as "Not Responding". Two solutions have been proposed

1. have dummy code which responds to UI events to keep OS-X happy
2. Rip out the Cocoa code from the additional processes which will make OS-X not expect the process to respond to UI events.

Re:Wha...?

[noundi]

It seemed more like flamebait and I didn't realise it was a joke, I apologize for that. However in my defense idiots posting such comments seriously aren't rare to find on /.

Again, my apologies. :)

Re:Wha...?

[pHus10n]

I'm not sure if your first suggestion is a "best-case" suggestion. Would you/we really want dummy code inserted for UI events? Wouldn't this open up a potential backdoor for code injection, thus defeating the intent of the seperated processes? Or am I way off track?

Re:Wha...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry about it. We are talking about OS X here. The most Secure And Robust And THE MOST AMAZING operating system out there.

Re:Wha...?

[Nimey]

Seems to me your dummy code could just respond to anything from OSX with "success", if all that OSX wants is some kind of response and not something particular.

Re:Wha...?

[palmerj3]

Also, no Basic Auth. Just sits there.

Re:Wha...?

[Anonymous Coward]

But will it fcuk up adblock plus on other browsers like the windows version? Just Love that feature.

Re:Wha...?

[blind biker]

Window Positions Remembered

It does? I use Chrome on Windows XP, and I can't get it to remember the position and size of newly opened windows. It just won't do it.

And here's the funny thing: I played with some Dosbox games recently, and now I notice that Chrome opens new windows in another size and position - but not anything I told it to. Now a new window is just ridiculously small, so my quest to get Chrome to pen them at a certain size and position became that more pressing.

Re:Wha...?

[JonLatane]

After doing some fishing around in the OS X version, I've noticed the main problem here:

[~ : jlatane]% ps -x | grep Chrome
571 ?? 0:00.90 /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome -psn_0_315469
573 ?? 0:01.09 /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome --lang=en --type=renderer --channel=571.1a638f0.1327077787
589 ttys000 0:00.00 grep Chrome

The renderer is the same binary as the main process, but with some different flags used. I don't quite see why they're doing it this way, as having a separate image for the renderers would be much more efficient. In fact, the only reason not to use a separate image is so that they can just fork() rather than fork()/exec(), but the fact that the command line arguments are different for each process indicates that's not happening anyway. They could definitely reduce the time to create tabs even further, as the image size of a simple renderer would be much smaller than that of the full application. Also, they wouldn't have to link the renderers against Frameworks that expect UI events (although, depending on the layout of their code, this could potentially be resolved with lazy linking). Speaking of which, I think you meant "Carbon" when you said "Cocoa":

[~ : jlatane]% otool -L /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome | grep Cocoa
[~ : jlatane]% otool -L /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome | grep Carbon
/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Carbon (compatibility version 2.0.0, current version 136.0.0)

Of course, this is just me taking a quick look at their linking setup. The fact that they've got a 26M image that they're essentially just duplicating for each new tab is a little troubling; why didn't they, at the very least, separate WebKit into its own library/Private Framework rather than statically link it in? The only possible performance benefit this design holds is not waiting for dyld to resolve runtime search path information (on OS X), but that's certainly outweighed by the delay of copying such large images. It all seems far too amateur-ish for Google to me.

Re:Wha...?

[Zoolander]

My God, a retraction *and* an apology!
On Slashdot?
Are you sure you're in the right forum?
I'm going to have to go and have a nice lie down now...

Re:Wha...?

[Langolier]

I think the application code is in read-only or copy-on-write pages that are shared between processes. Most OS program loaders will load and link a static executable once, no matter how many processes it is loaded in. Even the different flags will just appear in program arguments (argv), usually on the stack, beneath the first stack frame, and will not affect the shared executable. That is why you need to look at the memory stats for processes with a skeptical eye, and why Chrome's memory reports in its task manager show both total and shared memory for the separate processes. Whether an OS loads a program twice, or forks a process, it will not duplicate memory pages until they need to contain different contents.

Re:Wha...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sig is oddly relevant to your post.

Re:Wha...?

[dzfoo]

>> What the hell did they release? A box of crayons where you have to draw the Internet manually?

Yes, at least for the Mac. The linux version is a wrench, a screwdriver and a roll of duck tape, where you have to build the Internet yourself.

        -dZ.

Re:Wha...?

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is bigger than just showing "Not Responding" in Activity Monitor though. OS X runs a program called spindump for processes that stop responding that takes a sample of the process and logs it so you can figure out what went wrong causing a hang.

Spindump can use a lot of CPU time unfortunately!

So Chrome can totally crush your computer while it's idle and OS X flips out thinking you have an entire set of programs that aren't responding.

Re:Wha...?

[david_thornley]

I think it means you can't hit freeway speeds, lock the doors or trunk, turn on the windshield wipers, or even park it in a garage.

Re:Wha...?

[mallumax]

No, I (or rather chrome devs) meant Cocoa. Take a look the relevant bug discussion

Re:Wha...?

[WillyDavidK]

You must be new here.

Re:Wha...?

[bonch]

Angry OSS tard misses sarcasm. More at 11.

Re:Wha...?

[blueZ3]

So the Windows version is a portapotty seat and some toilet paper?

Re:Wha...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't underestimate how difficult sarcasm is to detect in textual communication. Keep in mind you're also biased (cognitively speaking) in that you wrote the post.

Re:Wha...?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was obvious to almost everyone. It clearly isn't that difficult.

Re:Wha...?

[JohnBailey]

Don't worry about it. We are talking about OS X here. The most Secure And Robust And THE MOST AMAZING operating system out there.

Yep.. security through denial.

Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[timothy]

I just installed the .deb on this laptop, running Ubuntu 9.10 alpha. So far, seems nice and pleasant :)

I seem some rendering problems, but Hey, I blame google!

timothy

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[timothy]

That's "see," not "seem." It's late.

timothy

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[dword]

Yes, you do seem to have some rendering problems yourself.

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[Anonymous Coward]

I've installed the DEB also (on my Ubuntu 9.04). It's pretty stable (has not crashed on me once, though neither has Firefox) and fast. However, my Firefox has close to 80 tabs open (all filled with AJAX, Flash, etc. on my slow 1.4 GHz Celeron M with 512 MB RAM), so I'm not sure how they really compare in terms of noticeable speed while browsing regularly.

Also, just realized Chrome has spell-check!

(By the way, you can upgrade to regular Jaunty. There's no need to keep the Alpha.)

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[mdwh2]

You've found a browser that actually works with Slashdot? I'm amazed :)

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[Anonymous Coward]

GP's using 9.10. It's 6 more days till Alpha 2: Karmic release schedule.

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Slashdot render correctly?

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[Nimey]

You know, there are these things called "bookmarks". It's a lot smarter to use those instead of keeping open more tabs than you can use at once. You can even bookmark a group of tabs!

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[black88]

Really? Ubuntu? AND Firefox? with close to 80 tabs filled with flash and ajax? Color me skeptical!

Running 8.10 here on a 2.8 ghz intel box, with a gig of ram, and firefox cannot handle even a moderate amount of flash content without locking up, turning gray, and eating shit. It's so bad I have been considering trying to find a tabbed version of links2 to run in -g mode.

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[EvilIdler]

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.

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[Anonymous Coward]

9.10 Alpha and 9.04 stable are not the same.

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Not good if you're looking at porn, and you don't want your wife to know after you've left :)

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing you're anonymous - 9.10 alpha > 9.04!

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[badkarmadayaccount]

I think some *box family window mangers can tab windows independently of the programs rendering inside.

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[Anonymous Coward]

"(By the way, you can upgrade to regular Jaunty. There's no need to keep the Alpha.)"

Your parent said 9.10, not 9.04. That's Karmic Koala.

Re:Works for posting to Slashdot :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome has spell-check, but does it have comprehension-check?
(By the way, he can *downgrade* to regular Jaunty. 9.04 == 9.10, right?)

Chromium (not Google Chrome) already works nicely

[pieterh]

I've been using Chromium for some time on my Eee 1000, since FireFox hangs intermittently (slow SSD, which does not like apps that write a lot of stuff).

Chromium is a pleasant experience, fast and snappy. It used to crash all the time (e.g. when doing a copy/paste) but has been improved daily, and is now stable and usable. I don't know what the Google branded version would add on top. "DON'T DOWNLOAD" sounds like reverse psychology. Definitely, download, and use if you have a machine that is a little slower than the average desktop.

It's okay

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I've used Chrome on Windows, but found it to be lacking features like advertisement blocking, pop-up blocking, and NoScript-like functionality.

Luckily, Firefox works great.

And that's what I don't understand about Chrome. It's definitely a great idea to make Javascript faster, and rendering should always be as fast as possible, and the concept of locking each browser instance to a process is not without merit. But why can't they help Firefox?

Firefox is the standard non-Microsoft browser now. It is a serious contender to IE in ways that no other browser ever was. Only Netscape 3 was in anyway comparable, but we know how NS dropped the ball with Navigator 4.

Open Source software is about freedom, and freedom to do your own thing is definitely a big one. But the Open Source market is also unlike the standard free market. Instead of getting better products due to competition, you get worse products due to the split of resources. By taking interest away from Firefox, Google is possibly killing the only serious competitor to IE.

Killing IE's competition is not a good thing. We all saw the stagnant browser world from IE5 through IE6 where there was no Netscape to set Microsoft's feet on fire and Firebird was still a heap of crap trying to dig itself out of the ashes of Netscape. I'm worried that Google's Chrome effort will stick us all with IE8 as the web standard for years to come.

Re:It's okay

[Plunky]

Open Source software is about freedom, and freedom to do your own thing is definitely a big one. But the Open Source market is also unlike the standard free market. Instead of getting better products due to competition, you get worse products due to the split of resources. By taking interest away from Firefox, Google is possibly killing the only serious competitor to IE.

I don't think open source software is necessarily about what you want it to be. Just because Firefox is better than the competition today doesn't mean that Firefox will always be the best but if nobody tries to make anything better then stagnation will ensue. Monoculture is bad no matter who is director and I would rather see 20 options than 2.

Re:It's okay

[LinuxAndLube]

They are not eliminating the competition. They are replacing it with their own baby, that's all. Bye bye, Mozilla...

Re:It's okay

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you haven't used it enough. Chrome does pop-up blocking, and as far as I know, it works better than Firefox. Notice how sometimes pop-ups come up with Firefox? There's a javascript workaround that is specifically disabled in the V8 engine.

You're clearly biased towards Firefox, irrationally so.

Re:It's okay

[wootest]

Even if the rest of that argument (let's not have competition now that the browser I think is good is winning) made sense and all that matters is killing IE, Chrome is an additive force. In a world with only IE and Firefox, if you disliked Firefox, there'd be no alternative. There are people who like Chrome better than Firefox; if your goal is killing IE, that's *more* switchers, even if a bunch also switch back and forth between Firefox and Chrome.

However, outside of that, there's nothing bad with having many browsers around. What is bad is having many contrary *concepts* around. Chrome didn't drag a new rendering engine in, they used WebKit, which is good. Actually, they used a fork of WebKit, which is bad, but WebKit has been able to handle this stuff by merging in the necessary abstractions in the past.

Re:It's okay

[Anonymous Coward]

The "monoculture" of firefox-icefox-ubuntufox-iceweasel.... ? :)

Re:It's okay

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainly it is conflict of interest.

Mozilla have went too far at adding ever-more useless features to the Firefox code, instead of fixing the ACTUAL problems with it.
Google do not want that, they went to leave the features entirely to plugins. (more-or-less)

And considering the way that Chrome will handle plugins, i can say this as fact: Chrome >>>> Firefox
Chrome won't waste resources on plugins, you don't want one active? The sub-process is terminated, memory is released, simple. No restarts needed.
Firefox? "Oh, sorry bub, looks like you're going to have to shut 'er all down and wait while i get 'er back on her feet, should take a few minutes if you're lucky."

It is a shame what has happened to Firefox, it could have been so much more, but Mozilla ruined it all. (IMO)
Instead of adding a "billion more features", they could have spent time streamlining the code, actually making the browser more modular to save on resources.

Re:It's okay

[owlnation]

Luckily, Firefox works great.

Not on a Mac it doesn't. While Fx 3.0 is far better than previous versions on a Mac, it's still pretty poor. And you can't use Fx 3.0 on older Macs at all.

Adblock and flashblock etc are coming for Chrome. I use Firefox now, but unless Fx4.0 works significantly better on a Mac, and is multi-threaded, my continued use of it is time-limited. That's entirely Mozilla's own fault. They seem to be focusing on rebuilding Firefox as the Netscape suite, rather than actually making the core browser work efficiently.

Google has, unfortunately, been very slow about developing Chrome for Mac (as they usually are for all their software, Macs users appear to be an afterthought for them). This version appears to be intel only -- I sincerely hope that this is going to change. I have an old G3 running 10.3 that looks great and works well for surfing and playing music. I'd absolutely love to get Fx 2.0 off it, and use a browser that works effectively.

Re:It's okay

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox for Linux is actually quite shitty, they haven't fixed that scrolling bug in ages.

    - Posted from the x64 .deb version of Chrome, which is working suspiciously well.

Re:It's okay

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an extension which allows you to block these javascript popups, i'm fairly sure it's called Tab Mix Plus! (might be wrong on this)

Re:It's okay

[McDutchie]

I have an old G3 running 10.3 that looks great and works well for surfing and playing music. I'd absolutely love to get Fx 2.0 off it, and use a browser that works effectively.

The latestOpera still works fine on 10.3. It doesn't "look" very Mac-like but I'd call it effective.

You can also try iCab which has interesting features of its own. It uses the system WebKit engine, though, which in 10.3 is outdated.

Re:It's okay

[McDutchie]

Sorry for the extra reply. I forgot to recommend Camino which uses the Gecko rendering engine but is a real Mac application, and has built-in ad blocking.

Re:It's okay

[Anonymous Coward]

What's so bad about Firefox on the Mac? I mean, really? Admittedly I've been using the pre-3.5 betas for a while now, but even before that I didn't have problems with 3.0. Neither did I have problems with 2.x. It eats a lot of memory, but apart from that, no problems.

The simple answer in terms of your G3 is this - it's old. New stuff will run slow. Deal with it.

Re:It's okay

[plover]

And why do you think Google is interested in preserving Firefox as an end goal? They are not a non-profit foundation. They are much more like Microsoft or Apple: they want to make money.

One potential way to make money is to control the internet content all the way through end-user delivery. It may enable some things that seem otherwise impossible: delivering protected copyrighted content, for example. If they offered a browser that wouldn't let you save YouTube streams, then maybe the RIAA would let them display music videos. Maybe book publishers would let them display Google Books along a Kindle model. Or maybe Google has a workable micro-payment system in place that depends on the browser not spoofing the for-pay site. Or maybe they just want to make sure that Google AdSense and google-analytics can't be blocked by the end users.

A "non-trustable" browser (like Firefox with all its Greasemonkey scripts and Noscript and AdBlock etc.) can't offer the rights-holders enough assurance that they can deliver their data without it being copied. Chrome may be the guarantee that lets them make money.

Before another DRM flamewar erupts, I'm not saying that Chrome can technically offer any more magic solutions than CSS or copy-protected diskettes or any of a thousand other failed DRM schemes. But like Apple's Fair Play, it might be "enough" protection to convince the copyright holders to distribute their content through Google's tubes.

Re:It's okay

[pizzach]

Not on a Mac it doesn't. While Fx 3.0 is far better than previous versions on a Mac, it's still pretty poor. And you can't use Fx 3.0 on older Macs at all.

The last version of Safari for Mac OS X 10.3 was 1.3.2 (January 11, 2006). The last release of the Firefox 2 series for Mac OS X 10.3 was 2.0.20 (20 Dec 2008). That is a helluva lot of dedication and you just stepped all over it.

There was a proposal for the drop of Mac OS X 10.3 support a long time ago for Firefox 3. I recommend you read it. I'll be giving a few quotes below to stress the important parts.

For Gecko 1.8 there were significantly more Panther testers in the community than there are now. That trend will continue over the next 6 months and almost certainly accelerate when Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is released. By the time we release Gecko 1.9, I suspect that our community Panther testing resources will be so small as to be nearly insignificant.

I think you can guess how small a minority of a minority is. At that time, Omnigroup was was estimating "2% of their users were on Panther at the end of 2006." I wonder what that percent is now in 2009? Instead of supporting 10 people on Mac OS X 10.3, I would rather have the Mozilla folks focusing on making the experience better for versions that actually have users. The development team only has so many resources to use.

Re:It's okay

[MrHanky]

I haven't noticed the scrolling bug in Iceweasel, but I've experienced it in Ubuntu's Firefox. Is Iceweasel better than Firefox, or am I just lucky? I've been quite happy with Iceweasel, even though I notice Chrome's javscript performance is noticeably better (and Konqueror's, which I'm using right now, is noticeably worse, but still generally acceptable)..

Re:It's okay

[rnd()]

wake up and smell the github. Forking is not bad.

Re:It's okay

[wootest]

Good point, but if it renders significantly different from the other WebKit browsers (and those improvements aren't merged back), it's one more browser to test, which is one of the only actual potential problems with having many browsers.

Cue the "not using until it has adblock" posts

[vivaoporto]

Cue the "not using until it has adblock" posts in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Seriously, nobody cares if you are not using, no need to repeat it every time.

Re:Cue the "not using until it has adblock" posts

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.adsweep.org/
Not the same, but it seems to be close enough for me

Re:Cue the "not using until it has adblock" posts

[Anonymous Coward]

privoxy is almost as good, although sometimes over-sensitive.

intel only

[pbjones]

silly me for thinking that my G5 was good enough

Re:intel only

[lisaparratt]

Undoubtedly due to the Javascript JIT.

Re:intel only

[mdwh2]

Doesn't support my 68060 either :(

Re:intel only

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, you knowingly bought a EOL computer and now you're having a whinge it's not supported, nearly 4 years after the last one was sold? wtf mate?

Re:intel only

[Anonymous Coward]

If you own a Mac then part of that experience is forking over large amounts of cash to always have the latest gear. That's Apple's MO. The upcoming new version of OS X won't run on your computer either.

Re:intel only

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, it doesn't run on my Abacus, either. That's fucking ridiculous, yo.

Re:intel only

[harryandthehenderson]

Well then you better get to porting that Javascript JIT to PPC then if you want it to run on your G5.

Re:intel only

[Anonymous Coward]

silly me for thinking that my G5 was good enough

That's what you get for buying Apple stuff. Sudden changes that break backwards compatibility. You need to constantly buy upgrades to your hardware and especially software in order to be able to run current software.

Meanwhile, I'll happily run chrome on my 10+ year old Pentium 2, which is still in heavy use.

Re:intel only

[A12m0v]

V8 is x86 only :-(

How does this differ?

[acb]

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

Re:How does this differ?

[zyrorl]

chromium builds in the launchpad ppa are newer.

Re:How does this differ?

[Haiyadragon]

For one thing, there's a 64-bit build.

Chromium daily builds: "no native 64bit debs planed for now. The amd64 package is using ia32-libs.".

I guess they had to release a amd64 package to be compliant, so they just build a fake one.

mac version only intel

[mzs]

I guess it makes sense if you want exceptionally fast javascript, but still disappointing.

Re:mac version only intel

[TeknoHog]

What about Linux on PPC? It's not like this opensource OS is limited to x86.

Re:mac version only intel

[value_added]

What about Linux on PPC?

So ... open source is a Linux-only thing?

Re:mac version only intel

[TeknoHog]

So ... open source is a Linux-only thing?

No, but Linux is the only opensource OS where these releases are available. But that is somewhat beside the point, which is the assumed monopoly of x86. The same issue affects both OS X and Linux, so while Mac/PPC people are complaining about the situation, Linux/PPC should complain as well.

However, the opensource bit is important, because the assumed x86 monopoly means that many vendors view Linux as just another x86 binary platform. Which really misses the point of using Linux (as an alternative to the closed OSs) altogether.

Re:mac version only intel

[Anonymous Coward]

They're already assuming that Linux is the dominant OSS platform. Assuming x86 is the dominant architecture is hardly a leap.

Re:mac version only intel

[Anonymous Coward]

IAEATMTWPOA (I always expand abbreviations, thereby mooting the whole point of abbreviations)

PPC: Power Personal Computer
x86: 8086, 80186, 80286, 386, 486, 586, 686 etc. (et cetera)
OS X: Operating System Ten
Mac: MacIntosh

Re:mac version only intel

[TeknoHog]

Actually, PPC stands for POWER Performance Computing. Or Particle Projector Cannon in case you're into BattleTech.

BTW, my sig is mostly aimed at people who start their posts like "IANAPPP (I am not a particle projector physicist) but..."

Re:mac version only intel

[ari_j]

What about OS X on PPC? That's much more common on my desk. I was trying to find the sources and see how bad it was on the Mac just earlier this week, and the reason it is x86-only is because the JavaScript VM that really makes Chrome what it is currently cannot run on other architectures. If anyone has the expertise to fix that, please submit a patch.

Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just wait for the final release.. can't take to long.

repo

[sveard]

from http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel :

Installing Google Chrome will add the Google repository so your system will automatically keep Chrome up to date. (If you don't want Google's repository, do "sudo touch /etc/defaults/google-chrome" before installing the package.)

But it didn't (and I didn't touch /etc/defaults/google-chrome)

Re:repo

[SchizoStatic]

Did you actually check for updates or hope the magic update fairy would do it for you? I have had no issue with updates on ubuntu with chromium.

Re:repo

[sveard]

Okay, never mind my previous post

Knowing Google, they did things differently and added /etc/chron.daily/google-chrome which has the deb line and the signing key

Re:repo

[sveard]

I'm glad you didn't and I'm sure I won't have any issues either, check my other post /etc/cron.daily/google-chrome creates /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list

There's no need to act superior :)

Re:repo

[MichaelSmith]

added /etc/chron.daily/google-chrome

Hey that is different!

Re:repo

[sveard]

I'm posting using Google Crone, it's probably a bug

Distro support is abysmal

[Aequo]

It's thoroughly disappointing to see a team of programmers only able to produce releases for Debian-based systems – the "couple of distros" referred to in the story are Ubuntu and Debian. It's also a huge hassle getting it to compile because it's such an enormous download from SVN (gigabytes, I believe; I gave up when it got to 480 megs). Make it a little easier to test please, guys.

Re:Distro support is abysmal

[SchizoStatic]

Which is why linux is not supported by most software companies. Heh queue the linux distro fight and base system.

Re:Distro support is abysmal

[Adam Jorgensen]

I agree. This is a joke. I'm running OpenSuse right now and in the past I've mostly used Mandriva. Some RPMs would go a long way... The world does not begin and end at .deb

Re:Distro support is abysmal

[Anonymous Coward]

For testing purposes you can just extract the files from deb. I just did this Arch using dpkg installed from AUR. Sure, it doesn't integrate with the rest of installed packages, but I'm not committed to using it full time anyway.

Re:Distro support is abysmal

[jocknerd]

5 years ago I was arguing the same thing except I was questioning why everything was only packaged up as RPM.

Re:Distro support is abysmal

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, sorry but RPM was never a good format. The world has chosen and it's Debian.

My Debian based systems have a little program called 'alien' that lets me install RPM's and such. Are you telling me that Redhat based distros are so piss-poor that you have nothing that will install a .deb package?

Re:Distro support is abysmal

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because when you are multi-billion dollar corporation and you are building a web browser from scratch, the most difficult part is packaging it up as both an RPM and a DEB. Sure, a bunch of unpaid volunteers can package their own software in multiple formats for multiple distributions, but it is much much too hard a nut to crack for a company like Google.

Re:Distro support is abysmal

[IBBoard]

If you're still running 32-bit then you may be able to download the .deb, open it with File Roller, open the data.tar.gz file inside, extract /opt to wherever you want, sym-link the main executable to a bin folder, and run it.

Unfortunately the 64-bit .deb is a 32-bit app, so I just get "bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory" then "error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" after installing the i686 glibc, and so on.

Of course I do!

[metacell]

"[...]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."

Of course I do. I used Windows 95 for years!

Re:Of course I do!

[MichaelSmith]

I am posting from Chrome now. It seems quite zippy. I didn't expect it to be (or seem) faster than Firefox. I wonder if the XUL middleware in FF slows things down.

Yuck, a Chrome developer

[cerberusss]

Dan Kegel (who admits to being a Chrome developer)

They say it like it's something dirty!

Girl: "Mom, I've got a new boyfriend."
Mum: "Really, pumpkin?"
Girl: "Yes. He's a Chrome developer!"
Mum: "Oh!" *faints*
Dad: *finally looks over his newspaper* "Straight to your room YOUNG LADY! You're grounded for a week with no telephone!"

Re:Yuck, a Chrome developer

[Norsefire]

Source: Conversation overheard in the Gates household

Re:Yuck, a Chrome developer

[IceFox]

Well a lot of the chrome developers are Windows developers so I could see how it could be embarrassing.

Re:Yuck, a Chrome developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Good call. At first I thought it was Ballmer, but then I realized there was no chair involved.

Still mad at Google

[bogaboga]

Trust me, I admire Google. But I am mad at them for using the "wrong" toolkit in developing Chrome for Linux. Slashdotters, this is *my* opinion having used both toolkits and deployed software though not as complex as a browser on all operating systems.

And I have at least one supporter on this front.

What they should have done is to fund development of Chrome using the "right" tool for the job. What would be wrong with that?

Re:Still mad at Google

[jcupitt65]

Two issues are being confused there. First, do you use a cross-platform toolkit, or do you write a true native GUI for every platform and just keep the backend in common? Google have decided to write a new GUI for every platform, and I think they are probably correct to do this. Qt (and GTK+) are cross-platform, but they are not quite native (though arguably Qt is better at this).

Once that choice is made, all you are doing is picking a toolkit for Linux. GTK+ has the advantages of being familiar to the chrome devs, matching the existing ff dependency, being the most widely-used toolkit (and therefore appearing native for the largest number of users), and being "good enough".

Re:Still mad at Google

[drinkypoo]

It would have been smarter to use Qt than to have very Windows- and Mac- customized ports, and then you would have got a Linux port for free. You can use QGtkStyle (included in Qt 4.5, but you can run it yourself now) to make Qt apps look like GTK ones.

This seems kind of retarded because Google Gadgets is already GTK and Qt. Obviously they didn't build a GUI abstraction layer then, and reinvented the wheel then (with Qt and GTK+ versions.) So now they will do it all again for Chrome. I guess someone should explain to Google about code and component reuse.

Re:Still mad at Google

[harryandthehenderson]

This seems kind of retarded because Google Gadgets is already GTK and Qt.

And Google Gadgets has different engineers working on it. The team working on Chrome, as Ben pointed out, has more experience and familiarity with GTK which is why they are using it.

Re:Still mad at Google

[pherthyl]

>> First, do you use a cross-platform toolkit, or do you write a true native GUI for every platform and just keep the backend in common?

I'd say considering in how bad of shape Chromium on Linux and Mac are, it's pretty damn clear that writing separate GUIs is the wrong approach. Skype is another example of an app that gets is completely wrong. They have separate "native" GUIs for each platform, and each platform is completely different than any other. If I know how to do something in Windows, I won't have a hope in hell of explaining how to do that to a mac user of Skype because the GUI and features available are wildly different on each platform.

In contrast, have a look at the screenshots of the arora browser. http://code.google.com/p/arora/wiki/Screenshots Written in Qt, less than 10,000 lines of code, and probably far less than a tenth of the effort has gone into it as has been put into the chrome GUIs (it was written as a Qt example, and now there's just a couple guys contributing to it in their spare time). It's not perfect, but it shows that you can get very nice looking cross platform software that integrates well into each platform with a modern cross-platform toolkit. With the resources behind chrome, it would be easy to polish off the remaining small issues and add whatever platform specific code is necessary for the more advanced features.

Then there's my personal experience. I write some custom apps for a niche market, strictly in my spare time (but it is profitable). Last week a client casually asked if he could run my app on his Mac. Of course, I say, and within an hour of figuring out how to set up a development environment on OS X I had a 98% fully working version of my program on a mac (~10,000 lines of code). If I had made the mistake of writing my GUI in a native toolkit, the port would have been a complete rewrite, and completely impossible for me to do in my spare time (since most functionality is GUI related (it's a diagramming tool)). Thanks to Qt I develop for one platform and get the others essentially for free. Nothing else can match that (aside from Java, which is pretty horrible for client side apps).

Re:Still mad at Google

[SleepingWaterBear]

It would have been smarter to use Qt than to have very Windows- and Mac- customized ports, and then you would have got a Linux port for free. You can use QGtkStyle (included in Qt 4.5, but you can run it yourself now) to make Qt apps look like GTK ones.

Qt may be a cross platform toolkit, but the reality is that you don't get the same level of responsiveness out of it on all platforms as you can get using platform specific tools.

In a market like the web browser market, feeling a little sluggish compared to the competition is fatal, and they were completely correct not to use Qt for all platforms. Not that I'm sure GTK is the best choice for Linux, but for a project like Chrome, it's definitely the right choice to use the best tools available on each platform even if it means rewriting a lot of code.

Re:Still mad at Google

[drinkypoo]

Well, I think it's fairly clear that if google is going to be writing a trillion one-off applications to do simple tasks and wants them to be responsive and cross-platform at the same time, they're going to have to come up with some kind of widget library for this purpose. I kind of thought wxWidgets was for this, but maybe it sucks in some way that makes it inadequate for the task, and irredeemable as well; I am certainly not familiar with the issues involved.

I guess we can draw a little verbal flowchart here; If you need your app to be light and run across multiple platforms, then you're going to have to draw widgets using some native elements of the prevailing UI. If you also want rapid development across all these platforms, then you're going to need some kind of UI library to sit in the middle. If one exists already that you can improve, then the most sensible thing to do is to improve it; if it doesn't, then you should just bite the bullet and make one. It would save many hours of effort at google if they had a single widget library that could handle all their lightweight apps across at least Windows, Windows Mobile (I adore Google Maps on my Fuze), Linux, Android, and Mac OS X.

Re:Still mad at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to break it to you dude, but here's the reason Google didn't use Qt: they don't want to beta-test and work around your software. Sure, Qt in theory works on Linux, Mac and Windows, and newer versions can even be made to look reasonably native. What do you do when it doesn't work? Say a control looks weird on Windows, or the layout spacing is weird on OS X, or you want to add a widget that's a little outside Qt's standard set (such as a tab bar that melds with the title bar at the top of the window), or you run into a performance problem. If you're using Qt, your only option is to go debug someone else's giant library, learn how it works, then learn what is the minimal way to change it so it does the thing you wanted, then hope that your change can get integrated into trunk so that you don't have to maintain your own fork of Qt going forward. If you develop your own UI toolkit on each platform, it takes a bit longer to get started, but you can ensure that you have full control over the software, that it's blazingly fast, and that you have a developer who understand exactly what it's doing. Qt is "good enough" if you just want to get a GUI on the screen on 3 platforms and forget about it, but it's not there for getting a *great* GUI. And the whole point of the Google Chrome team is to write a fantastic GUI; not Bob's Open Source Music Player, not Joe's Programming Editor, but a web browser that people spend 90% of their computer time interacting with. Qt is obviously still in development, and eventually it *may* turn nice enough that people want to write native Windows and OS X apps in it, or it may turn out like GTK and look like crap even with the "native" look. But in general it's going to be harder to make a cross-platform toolkit than to work separately on each platform when you care about the details.

Re:Still mad at Google

[segedunum]

Google have decided to write a new GUI for every platform, and I think they are probably correct to do this.

Hmmmm. Writing an application that you expect to work in the same way across all platforms, minus slight GUI changes, whilst making sure that needless and difficult to reproduce bugs on different platforms are minimised, or at least known about? I doubt many sensible application developers would agree with you.

Besides, it's quite easy to write a cross-platform core with something like Qt and then make specific platform changes where needed, so I never understood where the Chrome devs' arguments were going with that one.

Once that choice is made, all you are doing is picking a toolkit for Linux. GTK+ has the advantages of being familiar to the chrome devs

Well, no you're not because the Chrome devs have already been bitching about how poor GTK+ is from the back of their hands. It's very, very difficult to reuse and extend the toolkit for the kinds of GUI effects they want to achieve and given that extending GTK+ has historically been done by using brain damage like libsexy, libegg and even copying and pasting code into an application (Chrome on Linux is currently a 500 meg executable that draws a window) then the choice about what toolkit is suitable is pretty damn clear. You even have an implementation of WebKit directly available in Qt. It's virtually impossible to justify GTK+ rationally given the type of application they are developing.

being the most widely-used toolkit (and therefore appearing native for the largest number of users)

Qt ties into GTK's look and feel and has done for some time. You need not alienate anyone.

and being "good enough".

Heh.

It's crystal clear what's going to happen - a piss poor Linux port with bugs that can't be reproduced on Mac OS and particularly Windows and where no one can be bothered and there isn't the time, resources or motivation to actually fix them. It's why Firefox is so poor on Linux when compared to the Windows port.

Re:Still mad at Google

[segedunum]

Qt may be a cross platform toolkit, but the reality is that you don't get the same level of responsiveness out of it on all platforms as you can get using platform specific tools.

Oh please. Qt applications aren't Java ones, they're natively compiled and you're going to need to back that up with something for it to mean anything. I doubt whether you can get less responsive than Firefox on Linux which is built with a similar approach.

Besides, if you're creating cross-platform apps then you trade off certain things to make sure that your ports to different platforms actually work properly. Going for some mythical responsiveness isn't going to matter if your port is just plain inferior and people don't care about the bugs or features for it.

Chrome, it's definitely the right choice to use the best tools available on each platform even if it means rewriting a lot of code.

If you believe that's acceptable for any application, especially one that people expect to work in the same way on each platform, then you're nuts.

Re:Still mad at Google

[SleepingWaterBear]

For a UI, writing the code just isn't the hard part. The hard part is designing the UI specification so that you know exactly how you want it to behave in every situation. Once you have that, coding to spec is a matter of man hours and testing, but there's nothing fundamentally difficult or uncertain about it. Keep in mind that no one's talking about rewriting the engine for each OS.

For the vast majority of projects, you're entirely right that it makes more sense to take a small performance penalty for the advantage of cross platform code. I think that the web browser is almost unique in this case though, because it gets such heavy use that even a very small performance penalty is significant to many end users. You're being dogmatic, and usually you'd be right, but I think that this is the exception.

Also, people don't expect exactly the same behavior from the UI cross platform; quite the opposite in fact. People expect you to design the UI to integrate well with the desktop environment you're working in, and that means slight differences in appearance and behavior from one system to another.

Looking at some major cross platform projects - GIMP and VLC come to mind, they're excellent programs, but their adoption has not been widespread outside of Linux, and I think it's primarily because their UI doesn't feel natural on other platforms. (well, VLC's interface doesn't even feel natural in Linux, and I personally wouldn't use it if the underlying engine weren't so dramatically superior to the competition, every time I install Ubuntu on a machine I start by trying to use Totem, but eventually run into something that Totem doesn't handle gracefully, that VLC does)

Re:Still mad at Google

[shutdown -p now]

Looking at some major cross platform projects - GIMP and VLC come to mind, they're excellent programs, but their adoption has not been widespread outside of Linux, and I think it's primarily because their UI doesn't feel natural on other platforms.

Both are Gtk applications though, no? Meanwhile, a good example of a Qt application is Psi - and it looks really nice and "native" on both Windows and Linux, and I hear OS X as well.

Re:Still mad at Google

[SleepingWaterBear]

This is probably true; I think qt does a better job of feeling native on other platforms than GTK. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make a cross platform program feel natural, just that exactly duplicating the UI from one system to another won't do. I'd guess that Psi under OS X has some noticeable differences from Psi under Windows.

Transmission is an example of a very succesful cross platform program (it's at least quite popular on both OS X and Linux.) and they actually have not only an OS X native version, but both Qt and GTK versions.

Re:Still mad at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Users care about functionality. This myth of perfect GUI integration into the underlying desktop doesn't exist in the real world. One needs only look at the hundreds of different of disparate themes available for apps like Opera or Firefox. I find most of them utterly unappealing, but to somebody somewhere, they're gold otherwise they wouldn't have been created.

GoogleEarth is proof positive that Qt simplifies the portability of even complex applications. If the original application hadn't been coded with Qt (specifically to target multiplatform capability) when they acquired it, I can't imagine that Google would have invested substantial resources porting from the ground up for Linux. It would likely be a watered down version lagging behind the Windows version, a la Skype, if it even saw the light of day.

Qt is more than a GUI toolkit. It provides the glue to the underlying platform and resources. Looking at Opera, the primary reason they use it on *nix is to hook to the underlying platform for things like networking or printing. They basically render their own interface.

Taking it a step further, with Qt running on Windows Mobile and Symbian, they could have laid the groundwork for a simplified to port to mobile platforms.

Google already has the expertise in house to work with Qt. They simply chose not use it, even for the linux port.

Ultimately, the decision is theirs and they are free to make it for whatever reasons they desire. What remains to be seen is if Google will be able to produce linux versions that are at feature-parity with the newest Windows, or even OSX, versions.

Re:Still mad at Google

[Fastolfe]

Simply using a cross-platform toolkit doesn't mean your ports are "for free". The sandboxing techniques used by Chrome, for instance, depend heavily upon the facilities provided by the OS. The UI toolkit is a very small part of the problem for some applications.

I guess someone should explain to Google about code and component reuse.

Clearly, they need your help!

Re:Still mad at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

So, why don't they use QT, fund Nokia to fix the performance (if any critical)?

Google is one of the company that can go straight to the point without moving to sideways by their good financial status. And then everyone else developing cross platform applications can benefit too. And Google is trying to act like some private company by self doing everything?

Re:Still mad at Google

[segedunum]

For a UI, writing the code just isn't the hard part. The hard part is designing the UI specification so that you know exactly how you want it to behave in every situation. Once you have that, coding to spec is a matter of man hours and testing...

Anybody who has written code for a UI, user facing, system knows how stupid that statement is. When you're replicating large parts of UI functionality on different platforms that is doubly so.

Keep in mind that no one's talking about rewriting the engine for each OS.

Firefox didn't either. It hasn't helped their cross-platform ambitions. Most of their issues are UI tie-ins and working out how to do certain UI things on different platforms.

Also, people don't expect exactly the same behavior from the UI cross platform; quite the opposite in fact.

In this case that's wrong. Chrome is a unique application that doesn't look like many other apps that you'll run natively. As I'd said though, if you want an application to run well cross-platform then you need to minimise bugs and replication between ports. No one cares if your app looks native if it is crap.

Re:Still mad at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

99.9% of the interface for google earth is OPENGL based. Qt is a very thin layer... and google's experience with Earth was: cross-platform sucks, and GTK is a better choice for developing on Linux. Get the fuck over it.

I Know......

[segedunum]

Let's give Dan Kegel even more spam by posting his e-mail address.

In related news: chromium!

[Tei]

I just did..

$ apt-get install chromiunm

I am writting this from version 3.0.182.0 from the ubuntu repositories. I kind of like Chromium/Chrome over Firefox. And this is from a guy that develop XUL applications (lol!).

Reason to install chromium?

The ability to expand a textarea. Is usefull to edit some SQL in phpMyAdmin... I can probably add a plugin to firefox to do that, but with chromium/chrome is a standard feature.

Re:In related news: chromium!

[BiggerIsBetter]

$ apt-get install chromiunm

I tried that but all I got was a stupid scrolling arcade game. :(

Re:In related news: chromium!

[Anonymous Coward]

$ apt-get install chromiunm

I tried that but all I got was a stupid scrolling arcade game. :(

*Sticks tongue out* You're stupid... Chromium is awesome fun. You probably just lost a bunch!

Re:Chromium (not Google Chrome) already works nice

[reynaert]

Most Eee PCs have two SSDs: a large, slow one and a small fast one. Firefox became a lot snappier once I moved my profile directory to the fast SSD. Obvious in retrospect, I know...

You're lucky

[CarpetShark]

If it's working at all for you, you're very lucky. I've been trying every .deb update for a (short) while now, and none of them can even load their own start page. Or google. Not sure if the startpage is google. All I see is an MacOS=9.x-style and/or AtariST-style crashed icon in the center of the page area.

adblock...

[zoso]

Well there is already Chromium for Linux and it contains adblock preinstalled which obviously original Chrome won't have.

CPU Usage...

[PhotoGuy]

Here's why I'm excited about/anxious for Chrome on OS/X:

I used Firefox for awhile, a couple of years back. It bogged down the CPU, especially after running for awhile.

So I switched to Opera (and shortly thereafter went from Windows to OS X). It was a peppier experience. But with newer releases, and the increasing use of Flash (I think) on the Net, it started getting slower and slower. I don't like having my fan run while I'm simply sitting and reading a static page. Turning off all plugins seems to avoid that, so I point the finger at Flash. But not having Flash, or only having it on demand, is fairly annoying. Also, there's some sites Opera just won't render properly. Not many, but some.

So I switched back to Firefox, with the advent of 3.0. Even doing nothing, sitting with a few static pages open (and Adblock, Flashblock) it seems to still hover at 10% CPU usage. Bleh. Enough to keep my fan humming all the time.

When I tried Chrome on Windows, I was quite excited, with the process-per-page approach. I can see *what* page is slowing things down, and kill it if I chose. That's my biggest beef with Opera/Firefox (I won't even let IE into the discussion :P): you can't tell *what* page is slowing down your browser. I've tried JavaScript debuggers, other dev tools to try and found out, but have had no success.

I'm praying that Chrome on OS/X will be my salvation (although I've become dependent upon some Firefox extensions, particularly vimperator :P). Upon first glance, it looks pretty good (and I'm using it to post this article). It seems to suck up 30% CPU for 20 seconds or so *after* finishing loading a page, but then does settle down.

Right now I have about 5 tabs open, and each is using 2-3%, which is slightly concerning. That could add up to be just as bad as Firefox/Opera. But for now, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt of being an early release, and keep my fingers crossed that the "Browser That Finally Doesn't Suck [CPU]" is on the horizon...

Re:CPU Usage...

[skelterjohn]

If you're on os x, you should try out Stainless. It's quite good, and based on some of the same ideas as chrome, only more mature. I've been using it as my primary browser (above safari, firefox, or the new safari beta) for some time.

It's missing a few things, but honestly, I don't care. It's sleek, simple and multi-processed.

Actually one of my favorite features is the unified address/search bar. Only problem is I have to go to google first to search for queries that have periods and no white space.

Re:CPU Usage...

[Anonymous Coward]

But.. Why don't you just use Safari or Webkit?

Re:CPU Usage...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you have other problems. Several million other tech users don't get this CPU issue. You might want to investigate what settings are causing problems, or disabling / removing all plug-ins until you find a guilty party.

Re:CPU Usage...

[amn108]

No, i think, high cpu usage in pages that have flash is accurate description. The thing is, combination of sloppy Flash Player bytecode executing in a suboptimal version of Flash Player (i. e. for Linux to name one) really sucks the juice out of the CPU and laptop batteries. I am experiencing all those things. Laptop + Linux + Flash = slow, irresponsive experience.

Perhaps a good solution would be to implement some kind of careful sandbox in which all plugins would run, but not necessarily out of security concerns only, but also resource usage. Execute code in the plugin using at most 5% (or user defined) of the CPU, introduce rules and exceptions (when playing Flash games exclusively), etc. Use server-side meta-data (annotations) to tag what runs as fast, for example ads should use a "very low resource usage cap" constraint etc.

This is not only related to Web and Flash. We really lack such a facility on client side, where users have absolutely no control how much resources the applications they use consume. All you can do is restart or throttle down the CPU by force perhaps. Of course the problem is complicated one, but I think it can be done. Am I the one to do it? Maybe, but right now i have a headache :-)

Re:CPU Usage...

[amn108]

NoScript extension for Firefox may alleviate the symptoms :-) Does it fix the REAL problem? No. It is almost most annoying to use, when 75% of ALL websites I visit just fail to work without JavaScript, and I mean even navigation does not work, as sloppy Web-programmers use the horrid Microsoft-invented "postback" technique, which uses encoded navigation target as part of a JavaScript function call. Nothing insults WWW when the very method of navigating it - hyperlinks - is rejected in favour of some proprietary, user-unfriendly navigation URLs that need JavaScript to work. So with NoScript, it sort of defeats the purpose of using it, when you have to enable scripting anyway, which also brings all those non-filtered Flash Player applications to life.

Re:CPU Usage...

[drinkypoo]

NoScript helps me identify big fucking idiots. Then if I have a choice, I avoid their website. Anyone who is turning perfectly good links into javascript-only links is clearly not marketing to me.

Re:CPU Usage...

[RMH101]

Does it support keychain? That's why I'm still using Camino as opposed to Firefox...

Re:CPU Usage...

[Ann1ka]

If you like the OSX experience enough to stick with it. Why not give Safari 4 beta a try? It comes with better integration into OSX and has most of Chrome's features, with biggest miss being the sandboxing. It also uses the Webkit engine for rendering webpages, which is somewhat faster than Firefox's Gecko.

Re:CPU Usage...

[cbhacking]

For the record, IE8 (even the first beta) used multiple processes to handle tabs. It doesn't have Chrome's nice "Task Manger" interface, but you can fairly easily tell which tab is slowing things down (by cycling through them, if nothing else) and can kill a slow or even completely hung tab without brining down the rest of the browser. I'm not sure which of Chrome and IE8 had this idea first (or if they got it from some common source) but it's a good one and could stand to be copied widely. Firefox in particular still completely explodes if any tab (or the UI, or the freaking download manager even) crashes - it's all a single process.

Re:CPU Usage...

[dzfoo]

I've used Camino and it seems to be nice and even snappier than Firefox. However I require AdBlock on my browser (and to some extent, NoScript, though I can live with just disabling JavaScript in general in the browser preferences). Is there a reasonable facsimile for Camino? Because if there is, I'll switch in a heartbeat.

      -dZ.

Re:CPU Usage...

[sootman]

When Chrome came out, I was excited. Being a Mac user, though, I knew I'd have to wait. Then Safari 4 Beta came out, and it is quite fast (my main desire) and overall it kicks quite a bit of ass. You should check it out. I just hope these hidden preferences are still available in the final build.

Hmm... will Safari 4 (final) be announced at next weeks' WWDC?

Re:CPU Usage...

[RMH101]

Not really, Camino has some limited ad blocking built in though, which to be honest works OK for me. FF's font rendering seems to be much improved in the last version or so, so my only remaining objection to it is lack of keychain integration...

FpN homo?

[Anonymous Coward]

problem stems number of FreeBSD GNAA (GAY NIGGEr World will have

I humbly disagree.

[VulpesFoxnik]

Your joking, right? The Debian package distribution method is older and more sturdy than the RPM method of packaging. I remember trying to update to KDE 3.5 (when it was new) Suse ( 7 I believe ) and the system did not come back up due to dependencies. Debian's APT System is more intuitive, and contains checking inter-dependencies that RPM just does not have. The only method of distribution that is equal to it is the tar.bz2 / tar.gz methods.

Re:I humbly disagree.

[Aequo]

Stop comparing apples and oranges; automated dependency management is separate to the package manager. openSUSE has Zypper, for example, which does fantastic dep checking and resolution. Lots of recent innovation has been happening in RPM anyway -- the move to LZMA compression in some places for smaller packages and faster decompression is a good example.

Re:I humbly disagree.

[frodo from middle ea]

Seriously, every time someone compares apt to rpm , I feel like going sudo on them.

So what is this in KDE speak?

[QCompson]

Final release 2.3?

But seriously, this is how it's done KDE. Note that people still want to download it and test it despite the fact that it is not labeled a .0 release.

Nice html engine. Pitty about the UI

[vandan]

I find the Chrome interface quite revolting. But what's even worse is the psychotic bitchings of Ben Goodger, former Mozilla developer. My response to Ben discusses the issues he raised.

Re:Chromium (not Google Chrome) already works nice

[asdf7890]

Most Eee PCs have two SSDs: a large, slow one and a small fast one. Firefox became a lot snappier once I moved my profile directory to the fast SSD. Obvious in retrospect, I know...

If you have >512Mb in your netbook you could do what I've done: I keep the entire profile in RAM (on a tmpfs filesystem). On bok the profile is copied in to the ram drive and on shutdown it is rsynced back to the SSD (using --inplace to reduce copy+write operations on the urlclassifier db).

OK so it lengthens boot time a little, but it isn't often the machine is properly shutdown anyway (it tends to be suspended when not in used instead) so doesn't do a full boot often.

The urlclassifier db appears to be the main culprit for the "unexpected" IO in firefox. and even with all the relevant features turned off it seems to keep updating the file. If you don't want to put your whole profile in RAM (there is the risk of losing important bookmarks and cookies and such if the machine unexpectidly loses all power including battery or if normal shutdown scripts otherwise fail to be callde) you could probably just copy this file in and replace it with a symlink.

Does the job?

[rxmd]

I would bet that while you can't print, view YouTube videos or change your privacy settings yet, the core functionality of aggregating data about the user's browsing behaviour and sending it to Google with a uniquely identifiable ID is firmly in place.

Nice.. i guess, but not for me.

[msh104]

Great..., another package that wants me to install half of gnome.
( it's linked against gconf. )

As a kde user i'll have to say no this round.
I'll stick to firefox/konqueror for the time being.

Pretty happy with Firefox at the moment

[erroneus]

Using the Fedora Linux here and have been for a rather long time. I am very much "anti-advertiser" simply because they have a huge propensity to "go too far" with their advertising and data collection. (I have nothing against advertising when it comes to respectful means that the customer seeks out for himself.) Google, for everything else they do in terms of evolving the internet technologies, is still an advertiser. I don't trust them. I can't imagine why anyone else would either.

My prediction

[Starlon]

My computer's all black. I don't want any Chrome. I wonder how they're going to do automatic updates in Linux.

sorry

[the_fat_kid]

well, I, for one, welcome our new sarcastic overlords

Obli Anti-MS

[Barumpus]

...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.

Nothing new here. I get the same thing on Windows. Browser of choice does not matter.

By no means nothing against Windows. But it was the absolute first thing that came to mind when I read it.

BETA A.S.A.P.?

[jDeepbeep]

we'll get back to trying to get Google Chrome on these platforms stable enough for a beta release as soon as possible ..

Yes, hurry up with that.... so you can keep them in BETA for 5+ years afterwards. :p

Irony

[Alsee]

DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

How ironic, they announce new Mac and Linux versions and tell you not to download them unless you use Windows.

-

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant! I wish I had mod points.

Re:Irony

[pavithran]

I have to search google + chrome + linux for getting it . Anyways it was a sour experience cause my chrome install wont even open *a* page :(

Speaking of browser innovation...

[an.echte.trilingue]

Speaking of browser innovation, why is it that we still don't have any major browsers that have detachable/retachable tabs? Konqueror has done this for years: you can right click on an open tab and detach it to its own window, or drag one window into another to consolidate them.

I personally find this really handy, to the point that I am willing to overlook that several popular javascript libraries (like jQuerry) are buggy in Konqueror which breaks a lot of useful websites (google aps, yahoo mail...) and I use it anyway.

Yet none of the other browser people have done this. Does anybody know why?

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[tomservo291]

Last time I checked, chrome, firefox, safari all did this?

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[an.echte.trilingue]

Ah, well firefox does... awesome. My mistake.

Any idea how long the feature has been around?

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[techess]

I don't know about Safari on Windows but Safari on the Mac does this. I agree that it is very useful to pull a tab out into a window or collapse windows into tabs. I'll often open product searches in a series of tabs and then pull one off to do a side by side comparison. That is probably the biggest reason I still use Safari and not just Firefox.

Maybe it has something to with providing the OS/Window Manager and making the browser which allows the feature to work smoothly. Now that android seems like an OS possibility for netbooks & laptops maybe we'll see that feature on Chrome for android.

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[eiMichael]

Firefox does this with tabs between windows (at least in version 3.0.10), but not tabs to new window, or window added to existing window. Chrome does do it; however, as the article clearly states it's still a windows only browser. No clue about Safari, as I'm a poor college student who can't pay the apple tax.

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari 4.0 does detachable/retachable tabs on Mac, you don't even have to right-click, just drag

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[jisatsusha]

None of them do it very well. Try to drag out a tab to its own window when it's playing a video on YouTube, for example, and the video will go back to the beginning. Whether that's the fault of the browser or the Flash plugin though, I couldn't say.

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[Drantin]

Looking right now, I don't see an option when right clicking a tab (or in the window) to open the current tab in its own window.

It does, however, let you move a tab from one window to another by dragging it to the already existing window's tab bar.

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[jisatsusha]

Sorry to reply to myself, but it seems the latest chrome /does/ work properly with this. Could be to do with how it runs plugins in a separate process.

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Firefox fills in the missing gaps in 3.5 (tabs to new window, tab to existing window)

Re:Speaking of browser innovation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari has been doing this for ages. At least, they were detachable; Safari 4 allows tabs to be re-attached.

Broad generalizations but the point stands

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, that is just an excuse to anyone browsing Slashdot. I understand that my grandmother can't do that but the folks here should be able to download some local proxy (Privoxy is lightweight and works on multiple platforms) that can be configured to block ads. If they really would otherwise want to use chrome but didn't because of adblock, they could work around it.

People on Slashdot complaining "I don't use product X because of Y" remind me of people signing petitions or joining facebook groups about boycotting some company from which they wouldn't have bought products anyways.

Re:Chromium (not Google Chrome) already works nice

[Anonymous Coward]

I am posting this from Chrome for Ubuntu, and although Webkit and the engine itself is a great experience(after the 50% CPU usage for the first two minutes), I don't think I will use anything based on this until it gets a Firefox skin.
I am sure many people like this useless eyecandy that looks great on their slow candybloat window managers, but I still use Firefox 1.5 style tabs with one close button and 15 minwidth for maximum capacity. Chrome tabs look ugly and slow. Over or under the adress bar doesn't matter that much, just ugliness and bloat. Somebody fix that please.

Use the repositories

[an.echte.trilingue]

I am not sure why this is news, actually. The repository for Chromium has been available for Ubuntu for some time. Instructions for adding it are here:

https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

The big advantage to this is that you get the nightly builds automatically every time you update; no need to mess with downloading and installing debs

Re:Use the repositories

[dkegel]

You can use the Google repository, too; see
http://google.com/linuxrepositories

In fact, the .deb for Chrome *adds the google repository*,
so you get updated automatically.

The Google and ppa versions are likely to be very similar.
The main difference at the moment is the icon.

Re:Chromium (not Google Chrome) already works nice

[splict]

For those okay with using a browser which is under heavy development, Midori is another great option.

It's my main browser on my eeepc for its RAM savings and it has been great. I've been using the PPA (note you also need the Webkit PPA in Ubuntu 9.04 and has been very stable. Many features are missing, however, it is maturing very quickly. Keep firefox around, though, as Midori has had issues with a few sites.

Phoning home

[karmaflux]

Does it still send unknown encrypted data back to google at will?

Thanks, that's all I need to know about this browser.

Re:Phoning home

[mallumax]

You can use chromium if you don't want to use the google branded Chrome. Chromium will not send any data to anyone.

Re:Phoning home

[cerberusss]

Chromium will not send any data to anyone.

Yes, it's awful, it won't even send the data to the screen! When you type in a URL in the address bar, Chromium will retrieve the data and then KEEP IT TO ITSELF. It will smugly show a blank screen instead of showing the data. I think I even heard a satisfied snort from it.

Re:Phoning home

[Anonymous Coward]

Chromium will not send any data to anyone.

Of course it will send data to Google. If you prefer some privacy, change all the settings or use the Iron fork. (Despite being the Iron fork it's just as shiny as Chrome.)

Re:Phoning home

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, you can block the RLZ thing by creating a copy of the default Google search engine, removing the {google:RLZ} part of the URL, and setting it as the new default. (Edit your search engines by right-clicking in the Address Bar.)

Re:Phoning home

[egosum]

Does it stil send unknown encrypted data back to google at wil

The article you link to claims the rlz parameter is encoded, not encrypted. Everything you read on the internet is encoded in some way. Encoded != encrypted.

NOT amd64

[uhmmmm]

A friend wrote up a Gentoo ebuild for it, which I went and installed (for the amd64 version - I run an almost entirely 64 bit system). Try to run it, and got this message:

/opt/google/chrome/chrome: error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

That's odd ... double check ... yes, /usr/lib64/libgconf-2.so.4 exists ... No ... they couldn't have ...

$ file /opt/google/chrome/chrome
/opt/google/chrome/chrome: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, stripped

*facepalm*

The 64-bit Chrome is *NOT* 64-bit, and will not run on 64-bit systems which are missing a number of 32-bit libraries.

Re:NOT amd64

[msh104]

as a kde user, i was more worried about the usage of that library itself.
( as i don't plan on installing half of gnome for a webbrowser )

Re:NOT amd64

[Anonymous Coward]

V8 (the Javascript engine) is 32-bit only for the moment. It will soon support 64-bit codegen at which point we'll be building real 64-bit binaries. Running 32-bit binaries on modern 64-bit systems sucks, as you've already found out.

Re:NOT amd64

[Anonymous Coward]

So your ebuild is fucked?

Re:NOT amd64

[uhmmmm]

In the sense that it doesn't pull in the 32-bit dependencies, yes. But rather than fix it, I'll just uninstall. Chrome should hopefully support 64 bit properly at some point, and I'd rather wait until then to try it out than install a bunch of 32 bit libraries for the sole purpose of running a very alpha browser that I'll likely play around with for all of five minutes.

Re:NOT amd64

[uhmmmm]

I had heard that V8 was 32-bit only right now, which is why I was surprised that there was an amd64 package. But everything I've seen online (in the admittedly small amount of searching I've done) indicates that 64-bit support is a low priority. I even saw somewhere mentioned that the code makes various non-portable assumptions such as sizeof(int)==sizeof(void*), which if true means they really weren't planning for 64-bit support when they started. I hope they add proper 64-bit support soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:NOT amd64

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they really have managed write an javascript engine that isn't 64-bit clean in 2008. Inspiring, isn't it? They try (but fail) to deflect accusations of cluelessness at

    http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/64-bit-support

Re:NOT amd64

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, they really have managed write an javascript engine that isn't 64-bit clean in 2008.

You do understand that their JavaScript engine is a JIT, right? Which means that it compiles to native code. Which means that the compiler part has to be distinct for every new architecture.

"64-bit clean" doesn't even enter into this - it's not a simple matter of not making silly
assumptions like sizeof(long)==4.

Not good enough for Apple....

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be good enough for you, but it aint good enough for Apple.

Re:Not good enough for Apple....

[yabos]

Apple makes Chrome now do they?

Re:Not good enough for Apple....

[ColdWetDog]

Apple makes Chrome now do they?

Uh uh, just brushed aluminum. Chrome is tacky.

Linux sandbox progress

[dkegel]

Several approaches are being investigated; see
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxSandboxing
http://lwn.net/Articles/332974/
http://www.imperialviolet.org/2008/11/27/sandboxing-on-linux.html

Stainless

[the right sock]

Stainless is the only Chromium-based browser so-far that does what I hoped Chrome would do: let me have true separate sessions in each tab or window. To be clear: I can be logged in to every one of my gmail accounts in different tabs at the same time. It's still fairly immature, but hopefully it'll get to the point where I can use no-script and be done with FF.

Despite our hopes, FF is not immune to the Mozilla disease, that almost lupus-like systemic breakdown over time, inflicting its greatest damage just at its most critical point in life, when its every extremity is needed to fend off competitors but each slowly degenerating to useless dead weight easily torn, eaten, spat out on the remains of its predecessors.

Safari crashes with Flash a lot

[yabos]

I don't know if you've noticed but Flash tends to crash Safari all the time. If it can now only crash a single tab instead of the whole browser due to separate processes for each tab then that would be great. I hope Apple follows suit with Safari.

A quick look

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Well, the other day I tried out the new Opera on OS X, so I might as well give Chrome a spin. It scores 100 on ACID3, although it does say the linktest failed. The javascript performance is quite good, beating even the Webkit nightly 846 to 963. To give you some reference here the Safari beta 4 gets 7223 and regular Safari does 3144, so we're seeing javascript running 3 times as fast as the fastest of the currently, stable browsers and actually faster than anything else in development I've tested (although not by a lot). Sadly, Chrome does not use the native text handling so it does not currently use the native spellchecking, but a separate one. It can't use the built in grammar checker or dictionary/thesaurus or other cool services in OS X. It can, by default, resize text fields though, so that's a plus. Basically, it isn't there yet for an everyday browser, but it has a lot of potential.

Not a Chrome user I see...

[GameboyRMH]

You should give it a try.
.
The other feature I think should be universally adopted is tab grouping by site, like you can get with the Tab Kit addon for Firefox.

... for a couple of different Linux distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

So long as your distribution is spelled U.B.U.N.T.U

For everyone else: FUCK OFF!

why delays

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is based on webkit why the H-E double hockey sticks is it taking so long to develop a version for Mac/Linux? If this was Microsoft we would all be up in arms about them dragging their feet. What's up Google? I like Firefox on the Mac but I also like competition and would love to try Chrome. On windows I stopped using Firefox after IE 7 came out. IE 8 is a bit buggy in spots but overall good.

from the summary

[sorak]

please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

You're just begging for a windows joke, aren't you?

The Chrominator is back!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chrominator is back!!!

more crashing?

[incripshin]

I don't think it could possibly crash more than Seamonkey (I hated Phoenix, and I carry a grudge) does for me. It seems none of the devs ever thought to see if their code works with gcc-4.0. Or if they did, they threw their hands up in the air and gave up. It used to be a rarity with Seamonkey, but lately, the browser just freezes up after I look at 'so much' stuff.

You mean like fork()?

[spaceturtle]

This is true, but perhaps chrome uses some clever copy-on-write VM technology? Or (gasp) perhaps windows does? Any VM guys want to comment?

You mean like the everyday common POSIX fork() command? Yes, apparently Windows does have that capability, they just hide it in their API.

Dept. of Redundancy Dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

Considering they are already running OSX or Teh Lunix, that should be a given.

Almost done!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Meanwhile, we'll get back to trying to get Google Chrome on these platforms stable enough for a beta release as soon as possible ..."

... at which point, of course, they will be done.

quality is job 2.1

[Something Witty Here]

> incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software

As opposed to other web browsers? Seriously,
when are we going to have a web browser that
actually works properly?

No universal binary, no Tiger

[Trutane]

The Mac version of Chrome requires Intel CPU and Mac OS X 10.5.6 or later. So the (vast number?) of Mac users that are either still using a PowerPC-based or Tiger will have to sit this one out. With luck and perhaps some prodding, Google will produce a universal binary version that runs on 10.4.x as well. The Leopard dependency might indicate a requirement for Java 1.6, which is not supported in Tiger, unless you have an Intel mac.

Re:No universal binary, no Tiger

[saddino]

Luck and prodding aren't likely to result in a Universal binary: V8 isn't going to be ported to PPC anytime soon.

Hemanth

[hemanth.hm]

I was waiting for this . But still this page http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/linux.html doesn't speak about this version . Anyhow is Google still planning to release Gtalk for Linux ?

Random Mac Question

[drew]

As somebody relatively new to the Mac world, I have a random question. Given how standardized all of the other Meta key commands seem to be from one application to the next, why can't any two programs agree on the same key combination to switch tabs?

Chrome uses Meta+Alt+Arrow. Safari uses Meta+Shift+{}. Firefox uses Ctrl+Tab. Coming from a non-Mac background, Firefox is the only one that makes any sense to me, although I'll admit it's a little odd in that it is the only one that doesn't use the Meta key. And it's a little hard to keep that straight with Meta+Tab / Meta + `. But at least it doesn't require double chording or taking my hand off the mouse.

But really, can't you guys just all agree on the one true way and be done with it? Must I be condemned to constantly hit the wrong key combination every time I switch windows.

Get Chrome running on Fedora

[cerberusss]

Hi,

To get Chrome running under Fedora, take the following steps:
Download chrome .deb file
Create a temporary directory in your home dir:
$ mkdir ~/blah
Unpack the .deb file there:
$ cd ~/blah
$ ar x ~/Download/chrome*deb
Unpack the binary code:
$ tar xfz data.tar.gz
Move the binaries to your /opt
$ mv opt/* /opt

Now create a couple of symlinks in /lib so Chrome can find all the necessary libraries (apparently these are named differently under Debian and Ubuntu):
$ cd /usr
$ sudo ln -s libnss3.so libnss3.so.1d
$ sudo ln -s libnssutil3.so.1d libnssutil3.so
$ sudo ln -s libnssutil3.so libnssutil3.so.1d
$ sudo ln -s libsmime3.so libsmime3.so.1d
$ sudo ln -s libssl3.so libssl3.so.1d
$ sudo ln -s libplds4.so libplds4.so.0d
$ sudo ln -s libplc4.so libplc4.so.0d
$ sudo ln -s libnspr4.so libnspr4.so.0d

Now chrome can be started:
$ /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome

Create an application launcher on any panel for easy access.

So have the fixed the crashing yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even now, after however long they've had to fix things up, Chrome still crashes like crazy on Windows.

I really cannot use a browser that displays a sad face every second page I open, and asks me to "reload, that might fix it".

Since the core is WebKit, which is rock solid, I can only blame Google's poor code...outside of search they seem to be a bunch of monkeys with typewriters.

How incomplete ?

[pavithran]

Quote:
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.
End Quote

I was shocked to see a browser which was unable to display web pages :O
The irony is that it comes from a company which is a leader on the web and uses GNU/Linux extensively .
Other problems being I was unable to open the JS console or task manager .. maybe in simple words this is a broken software which is not even suitable for testing !!
Details:
Running google chrome 3.0.183.1 on Debian lenny 2.6.26-1-686 with KDE 4.1.4

Woo711!1

[awarrenfells]

It's about time. I love google chrome and hope they come out with a fully functional version soon.