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Chrome For OSX is Shaping Up Nicely

When Google released its browser last year they somehow thought it was a good idea to not make a simultaneous release or all OS platforms. Perhaps it makes sense from a developers perspective, since Windows user base is still an overwhelming majority. However it seems like us minority users of OSX and Linux won’t have to wait much longer for an official Chrome release. As we have pointed out recently that Chromium (an open source project by Google which Google Chrome is based on) for Linux got some major stable update.

Until recently that best way to install chromium on OSX was to build it from source, which wouldn’t be so bad but building it from source itself was a long process and huge undertaking (yes I have tried it). After downloading the source file of 600MB tarred (extracts into 2+ GB) you also have to download Xcode to compile it (another 900mb download) and of course the process of building it can take several hours depending on your machine.

Thankfully Google recently starting making chromium alpha builds available for everyone. Every incremental changes to the project gets a new build so you might notice several builds a day.

Few observation:

– Rendering webpages is almost as fast and reliable as native windows Chrome builds.
– No support for Flash yet.
– Does not maximize to the full width of the screen.
– Removing tabs and replacing tabs are a bit buggy.

Considering the fact its an alpha build its fairly stable and hopefully in few months we will have an official final release by Google available. But if you can’t wait few months you can try the chromium builds which is not that far from the real thing. Or if you are brave you can try to build it from source for the same result.

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