Immediately after Google Chrome announce, it was known that it will be on Linux and Mac. Some day… And this day is coming. Right now it is possible to compile Chromium on Mac and it will be a working browser!
Well, almost. I’m trying to use it and it works—this post is composed using Mac Chromium. But it’s definitely far from being a polished consumer product yet. Major problems that I found so far: the Omnibox (navigation edit box) only accepts URLs; downloads doesn’t work, and tabs crash from time to time. Though the last isn’t a big problem because Chromium is a multi-process browser, so a tab crash doesn’t affect other tabs. That’s pretty cool comparing to Safari 4 Beta.
What is really exciting is that Mac Chromium will become better and better every day. And any developer can help by contributing to a project.
6 Comments
How hard it was to compile it for Mac? Any gotchas? Also, do you see any benefit of using Chrome over Safari esp. v4?
Could you upload your build, please? I just downloaded the source, but I know compiling in XCode will take the better part of an hour, so I’d rather not. What build was it?
Here is a compiled version: http://sites.google.com/site/mikhailnaganov/files/chromium-20090329.tgz
Building is easy. Just follow the instructions: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/MacBuildInstructions
But, yes, it takes time. Also you need the newest XCode.
Cool, Tried your binary and I like it! Especially how tabs are implemented comparing to Safari4beta.
I think they need a button like in Safari4beta — “report bug”.
Yes, tabs are definitely better than in Safari.
I think that error reporting issues will be added later, when Mac Chromium will be ready for testing on real users.
Also, Chrome automatically reports crashes. I think that something similar will be in Mac and Linux versions too.
Where is google search bar in the browser? ;) Cmd+, (Preferences) looks missing too.