You are only what you are when no one is looking - Robert C. Edwards
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Google Chrome is out for Mac, Linux
INTERNET OMNIVORE Google announced today that its Chrome web browser is now available for Mac and Linux users.
In October we reported that Google co-founder Sergey Brin bemoaned the slow development of the Mac version of his firm's browser application. At that time the Mac beta was deemed unsuitable for release. However, that has now changed, apparently.
Today the company said that Chrome, which is now over a year old, has seen many improvements and lots of downloads. According to the firm some 40 million users have downloaded the Windows version and it is now looking to extend this success to Mac and Linux users also.
"Chrome has come a long way since launch. We've made even more speed and stability improvements, and it's getting better all the time," said Anders Sandholm, product manager for Google Chrome. "Today's launch is a big step: we wanted to bring Chrome to even more people to improve the way they experience the web."
The Internet giant claims that Chrome is fast, and it promises that Chrome will be able to run essential web applications and access websites much quicker than alternatives while remaining simple to use and secure to run.
Chrome is still experimental, however. It's beta software that is still under active development, and we're aware that it still doesn't support some functionality and features that other, more mature web browsers do.
Out it may be. But how fully featured and well supported is it? We'll still wait and see on this one for now. µ
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Well done to Google for a) finally getting an official Chrome browser into beta for Mac/Linux (a full year after Windows, ho hum) and b) finally supplying 32-bit and 64-bit RPMs for those not running a Debian-based Linux distro.
Black marks for Google though for supplying the RPMs only tested against recent Fedora/OpenSUSE releases - they don't work with RHEL 5 [or CentOS 5] (just the world's most popular commercial Linux) thanks to building against later expat and libstdc++ shared libraries.
Other bad points about the RPM packaging: they've called the package "google-chrome-beta" which is dubious at best (you put versions/alpha/beta designations in the version field, not the package name...duh!) and they install a daily cron job that dubiously creates a yum repo and auto-imports the GPG key too - not sure that's a secure way of doing things (and why is a cron job doing this - isn't this a postinstall job for RPM?).
I did get the RPM to work in Fedora 12 and it seems OK, though when you switch on the GTK+ themeing, the title bar and tabs look horribly out of place (i.e. unthemed). It's this "let's not conform to the standard GUI" attitude of Chrome that bugs me and you won't ever convince me that pull-down menus on icons are a good substitute for a menu bar, even if they do save vertical screen estate (yes, I know IE7 and IE8 do it too, but I think it's horrible on those as well).
Actually there *has* been a fully open source version of Chrome on Linux for quite some time now.It is called Chromium and has already reached version 4.0.266.0(though technically still beta).
Actually Chrome is based on Chromium,not the other way around.
You may try it using Synaptic,Software Centre,or if you prefer the terminal with this :
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
...after adding these at your repositories :
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
I agree, I clicked cancel. You almost need a freaking lawyer to understand it too. It defeats the use ideology of open source. My Ubuntu, ex Vista laptop is 100% open source. I want to keep it that way. Maybe if the smart people at Ubuntu and other Linux areas get Google to open source it under the that licence I will give it a try.
I went to download it, but there was a very long Terms & Conditions which you have to agree to. There was too much to read, and I didn't want to agree without reading it.
So I gave up.
I'm sure that Chrome is super fast, though.
...Mac has about 4% of the market, based on recent internet access log surveys.
So put 4% of your effort into that market. Or don't bother...doesn't seem worth it.
Chrome is so much faster than Safari on my Windows workstation, I've already got it installed on Mac (and posting this from it) but can't tell if it's quicker or slower yet.
But I do prefer the unified searchbox/URL thing.
Yey Mac OS has Chrome which means nothing as it is just Safari's rendering engine on a new UI with slower javascript execution.
Well at least the tabs look nice.