Google recently announced on its main corporate blog the release of an early development version of its Google Chrome browser for the Mac OS X and Linux platform. The software, however, is still rough around the edges and is meant for developers and early adopters only as it still doesn’t support a number of features, including Flash videos.
“In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, 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,” Google product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg said in the blog post.
Among other things, in fact, printing and bookmark management, privacy controls and the ability to change the default search engine into something other than Google are all features not yet implemented in this very early version. Google said that the bug count is currently over 400 and that the software will only work with Intel-powered Macs or Debian-based Linux distributions.
Until now, Google’s Chrome was only available for the Windows operating system, while Mac and Linux users have been waiting for a version that would work on their systems. The porting of a Web browser is a hard and lengthy process that includes the rebuild of some of the key Chrome components such as its graphical interface or the built-in sandbox that assigns different processes to each navigational tab.
But even despite being an experimental software, the Mac and Linux versions are a big step forward and a message from Google that it wants to show it will answer users’ feature requests submitted to them. Notably, even this early version is plugged into Google’s automatic update service, which means that new versions of the software will be downloaded automatically from the search giant’s servers as they are being released.
Web pages based on Flash technology won’t work with the browser, but JavaScript support, which powers many of Google’s Web products, is already fully working and with performance comparable to its Windows version counterpart. Now that a much larger audience will be helping Google submit bug reports, the search giant can expect to speed up the development and stabilization process for the software.
According to research firm Net Applications, as of May 2009 Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was leading the way with a 65.50 percent share, followed by Mozilla Firefox at 22.51 percent, Apple’s Safari at 8.43 percent, Google Chrome at 1.80 percent and Opera at 0.72 percent.
The growing share of IE competitors means webmasters need to take more care in making sure that their Web pages are compatible with the various versions of these pieces of software on different platforms. Google, however, maintains that this is not the case for Chrome as it uses the same WebKit rendering engine for parsing and displaying HTML code, the same used by Safari.
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com.You can visit his personal Web site here.
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Tags: Search Engine Daily Lead
