Developers take Mac, Linux-friendly Chrome for a spin

Google has released a rough-round-the-edges version of Chrome for the Mac OS X and Linux platforms, nine months after the browser made its debut. However, Mountain View has warned all but the most hardy of developers to steer clear of the test build versions. "In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early …

[Anonymous Coward]

Explains so much

"Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

That would explain why they released it for Windows first, doesn't it. Clearly, Windows users don't mind "incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software".

[Anonymous Coward]

Schadenfreude

"Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

If course, if you "take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software" you'll be using Windows anyway.

Sidenote:

El Reg: please can we get rid of the BillG icons... BillG hasn't been the boss of MS for a long time.

[Richard]

Quote of the day

""Unless of course you ... take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

Well, millions of average users run Windows Vista on a daily basis.....

-- Richard

[The BigYin]

"Unless of course you are a developer...

...or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

So that's developers and users of Vista?

[Joni Kahara]

Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, ...

@AC: Agreed. Give us Ballmer, now!

Here's a nice shot: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Steve_Ballmer_fuzzy.jpg

[Benedict]

my sides, they are splitting

oh the windows jokes, how they make me laugh.

[David Barrett]

Ok enough jokes about ms windows...

they wern't funnt anyway.

I think that this is a mistake on the part of google, regular users *WILL* download this without reading the disclaimer and recieve a terrible experience, they will then attribute this experience to google therefore google = shoddy software and they wont use it again...

I have seen this happen so many times its unreal, My favorite was a post on a forum about exeem (beta) it went something like "I wont be using thissoftware again and will be advising everyone I know to steer clear, I have the latest beta version and it still acts unexpectedly, its just not professional." or something to that effect (To be fair the main point of exeem was to provide another p2p sharing program, so you should really steer clear anyway...)

[Ben]

Beta?

Well, if Google hadn't abused the word 'Beta' they could have used it now. They only have themselves to blame.

What's wrong with calling something version 1 anymore? Everyone who knows about software waits until version 3 before it is regarded as stable anyway ....

[Chris Haynes]

Alpha Beta Ga-Ga-Google

Since many of Google's apps are in beta in perpetuity, when can we expect Chrome for Mac & Linux to be non-beta, non-crashing, and non-tat?

[Patrick O'Reilly]

Late to the party

I don't know where you guys have been but there's been a nightly repository for Ubuntu floating round for months at this stage.

Tried it out in 8.10 and it was ok, very unfinished but somewhat useable.

still won't beat Opera tho

[Anonymous Coward]

openistas

I _like_ being an openista.

[Anonymous Coward]

God, what a fucking joke

A company with the resources Google's got and it takes them this long to produce non-Windows versions of its browser? Pathetic. If it ever actually does come out on Mac then I probably won't bother to use it now on principle.

[Anonymous Coward]

not just for windows users

Lady GaGa also likes it. Apparently.

[Andy]

Well, it doesn't seem to fall over.

Half of it appears to be missing, but the half that's *there* seems not to fall over.

Cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

WINE

Does the Windows version work in WINE?

Paris because she would never let anything that hadn't been vetted properly appear on the internet...

[Muscleguy]

ignorance is bliss

Well a while ago I registered my interest in being informed when it came out and I haven't heard anything from them so if I wasn't masochistic enough to read El Reg I wouldn't know. So I'm of for a swig of Pan Galactic Gargelblaster to remove this knowledge.

As for everything Google does being a permanent beta I love Google Earth and find it perfectly stable and they keep adding new features, that um, work. If all betas were that good there were be no problems.

[Piers]

Everyone who knows about software...

...waits until version 3 before it is regarded as stable anyway ....

4

[Henry Wertz]

Not version 1

"What's wrong with calling something version 1 anymore? Everyone who knows about software waits until version 3 before it is regarded as stable anyway ...."

Because it's not right. The windows world this is what people do, but in the rest of the world, version 1 means the software is stable and ready for use; betas are feature-complete but may have bugs, and an alpha is essentially a chance to see how things are shaping up but features are missing (AND it's buggy).

[Darren Bell]

Ubuntu PPA all the way

I've been using it on and off since pre-alpha stage. It's missing many features, but every day I can see extra being added.

The reason why I'm keeping an eye on it is that its FAST. I'm not on about Javascript as too many people get hung up on that. I'm talking about DOM rendering. This makes or breaks a large Ajax based application.

At the moment it's the fastest at this.

Go try it people its getting good.

https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Vista

and on the whole it's great. I cursed it to hell and back once or twice when it corrupted my password db and I had to restore it from scratch but everyone does daily backups, right?

Chrome is the most stable browser I've ever used on Vista. It hasn't crashed yet and I usually run with 20-30 tabs open at a time. It's superb.

OS and browser wars are the preserve of some really tiny minds.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lunascape anyone?

Why isn't this browser make more waves?

http://www.lunascape.tv/

As far as I've seen, its the only one to score 100 on the Acid3 test:

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

[Tim Bates]

The question remains - What were they doing?

Simple question about Chrome is why it took this long to even get a clunky non-Windows version out... They supposedly intended to make it cross platform from the start, so why didn't they start by writing code that was designed around cross platform compiling?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stainless already delivers on Mac

Stainless is a browser that already delivers what you'd expect from Chrome on the Mac: light, fast, and sandboxed tabs. It doesn't have all advanced features of Firefox or Safari yet but it's already my default browser for two weeks:

http://www.stainlessapp.com/

[Anonymous Coward]

re: Lunascape

Not used Lunascape, but it's not the only browser to score 100 on that Acid test, as Safari 4 is advertised as having scored100 too.