Update: Chromium build 12558 is now available.
Since Mike Pinkerton published some screenshots of Chromium running on OS X, there seems to be a little uproar in the Mac community about when we will see the final version. I decided to investigate a tad and built my own version for OS X. My version, rev 9780, seems to do a bit better than Mike’s because clicking on links work. This seems far from complete though, so if you enjoy lots of unexpected quits, this app is for you.
There is another app that is built with Chromium, called TestShell. It is a version of Chrome with basically no interface – this is the version the Mac developers have been using to port the backend code over. TestShell is quite a bit more stable than Chromium, but you don’t get any of the features. What you are seeing on Pinkerton’s site are the first versions of the Mac look and feel being added.
Some interesting things I noticed in the Chromium source code (I didn’t spend too much time looking):
- There is an iPhone directory with resources and nib files
- The version of WebKit being used is almost in sync with the WebKit trunk
- There is some Mozilla code in here, but not as much as I would have thought
Other findings:
- The Google BuildBot waterfall page is amazing – work is being done on Chromium at a rapid clip.
- There are OS X Chromium torrents popping up of build 9750. People are having tons of problems with it.
Ok, on to benchmarks:
The updated Chromium build whomps WebKit with a 691 millisecond score. The above benchmarks are for the older version of Chromium.
Because this project is being developed so rapidly, I will start doing nightlies. Give me a few days to set that up.
I, as a Mac user won’t be using this pile of garbage. There are plenty of other better browsers out there. Why would I use a browser that was ported from the darkside?(WINSUX)
Bring on the ignorance… Chromium/Chrome is built on WebKit/WebCore, i.e. Safari! WebKit is a fantastic rendering engine, and Safari is a great browser, and having the resources of Google working on it means both will get better, quicker… it’s a win-win.
WTF? This thing is crazy. The first non wine version of Google Chrome and when I type a web address in it comes up with a new tab this is not ready to be used even from a testing standpoint this feels worse than a Alpha!
As someone else commented, this build doesn’t work at all. It won’t load a page at all. It just opens a new empty tab when you type in an address and press enter.
It will work. When that new tab pops up, wait and your page will load. I was able to run the SunSpider tests using this build. Now, the revision number is up to 9859, and a bit of work was done on the Mac side of things. I’ll post a newer build and get the nightlies up shortly.
Can’t get the Chromium build to load a page, but the Testshell works fine.
WHAT a Shame
A Company like Google that make Billions of Dollars a Year and so many GOOD Coders have not the Glue to make
a simple Browser that Works like Safari oder Camino
without a long Alpha and Beta Test
I just Wonder
Ich love Google don t missunderstand
There a a lot of good free products !!!
actually here it did not work at all, too. just more tabs popping up when trying to use a webadress… anyway chrome is just an information collecting device of google, isnt it ? 😛
Doesn’t work on default, “http://dev.chromium.org/” (opens new tab), but seems OK on other pages I tested.
I get zero response from Chromium and I get this in the console:
2/17/09 Feb 17,10:51:15 PM [0x0-0x2c92c9].com.google.Chromium[6172] [6172:523:183378159034641:ERROR:/Users/beetle/src/chromium/src/chrome/browser/cocoa/tab_contents_controller.mm(58)] Not implemented reached in virtual void LocationBarBridge::AcceptInput()
Only for Intel??? What about ppc users…google wants me to destroy my g4
Apparently. There is no way to build for ppc..
ya there is… its based on webkit which was designed for the PPC platform!!!
Chromium's good but why now download the mac version directly : http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.htm…
Cheers!
The Chromium builds are often far ahead of the official Chrom releases. They are basically the dev channel for the Mac.
The Chromium builds are often far ahead of the official Chrome releases. They are basically the dev channel for the Mac.