Chrome for Linux and Macs

[RoyGBiv]

http://media.bestofmicro.com/chrome-google,T-D-156577-1.png

Google Chrome is now available for Linux and Macs.

Google Chrome for the holidays: Mac, Linux and extensions in beta
12/08/2009 09:00:00 AM
There was nothing more excruciating for me as a kid than seeing the presents pile up under the Christmas tree but knowing that I couldn't open them until Christmas morning. On the Google Chrome team, we've had the same feeling as we've been working to get betas ready for Mac, Linux and extensions. It's been a long time coming, but today we can check the top three items off our users' wish lists.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-chrome-for-holidays-mac-linux.html

Not sure I'm as excited as this guy, but it's good to see they're holding to their promises at least. The Linux version is based on the GTK themes, same as Firefox, if that means anything to you.

Extensions are now also available, but for Linux and Windows only for some reason apparently. Extensions seem rather pale in comparison to some of the matured Firefox add-ons, but this is at least a move in the right direction.

And the browser wars continue ...

[pokerfan]

1. extensions

There Are Already 500 Chrome Extensions. They’ll Work On Mac Chrome By Week’s End
by MG Siegler on December 9, 2009

Tonight at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Google held an event to formally unveil and showcase the new Google Chrome Extensions. The browser add-ons, which launched just yesterday are already proving to be quite popular among both users and maybe more importantly, developers. Tonight Google announced that while they launched with around 300 extensions yesterday, that number has already grown to 480, and will hit 500 tonight.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/09/chrome-extensions-mac

[RoyGBiv]

2. Da-Yum ...

People have been busy.

One wonders about quality. I suppose a lot of these have been in development for awhile and are refined to an extent, but when things like this get out in the wild, shit happens ...

If I'm going to try to use this more than I day, I'm going to have to find a NoScript equivalent. I'd almost forgotten what it's like to run around the web with all manner of scripts running. Obnoxious.

[charlie]

4. They're spawning like rabbits, I think

because Google made it bone simple to create an extension. Looking it over, I see there's no futzing around with XML, extensions are just HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Access to native UI is primitive, you get an icon in the toolbar and that's it. No context menu, status bar, or file menu alterations allowed. The learning curve for proprietary properties, methods, and objects will be way shorter than Mozilla's, since there are so few of them. Basically, if you can make a webpage with interactive script, you can make a working extension in an afternoon. That's my first impression, anyway.

Browsing the extensions, most of them are interfaces to online services. The subset of extensions for purely in-browser functionality is pretty small. I guess that's to be expected, the former would be easiest to write. I hope the ratio eventually tips toward the latter.

I haven't found a script blocker yet. It's the first thing I went looking for. Running around naked isn't my cup of tea, either.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Oh lord ...

I just had a flashback to a Usenet flamewar about whether HTML coders should be called "programmers." I may not sleep tonight. :)

I browsed some more after posting and noticed the same thing you did. With your explanation on top of it, all this makes more sense.

Google is going to need to organize these by function fairly quickly as well. I'm sure they'll wait for the initial rush to die down a bit, but as it is, finding useful extensions is a chore.

[charlie]

6. Well, they are now

A tag wrangler can call himself a 5-star EXTENSION DEVELOPER if he's quick. A lot of the extensions just replicate bookmarklet functionality and are getting gold star reviews, like this one:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/okmlpemfjpklknpajkaapehdglgbkgin

Or are tutorial-example Javascript snippets prettified with HTML:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/njoipeaphfnaplplihpbgndfojhdhmjo

The window will close pretty quick, but if a HTML monkey ever wanted to do the Programmer Strut, today's his day :)

[RoyGBiv]

3. First Impressions

This thing is fast. Page rendering simply screams. The interface functions very well.

Startup is so quick I didn't have a chance actually to time it. I clicked the icon, and there it was. Less than a second.

But, it *is* a BETA, and I'm going to focus on some criticisms.

Font rendering in the Linux version is shockingly bad and is not following my .fonts.conf tweaks. This is entirely unacceptable behavior. I'd rather software venders just not write for Linux than pretend to do so, ignoring its conventions. Hopefully this will be fixed.

The functioning of the saved passwords is spotty. I let Chrome import everything from Firefox, which it did without a problem, but not all of my account names/passwords will auto-populate. To be more precise, the only site where this did work was Google. (I didn't check but about five sites.) I checked, and the username/password combos were there, but would not pull up in the input fields. After inputting them manually and answering "yes" to whether I wanted to save it, they did pull up afterward.

One of the things Chrome has going for it is how it sandboxes tabs, i.e. spawns a separate process for each so that if one dies, it doesn't crash the whole browser. That doesn't seem entirely to work here.

One of the first things I do when trying new software is try to kill it by doing uncommon things. I wasn't exactly trying to do that yet, but I did tear off a couple tabs just to do so, and when I did, one of them became unresponsive. After killing it, Chrome was unresponsive altogether and wouldn't load pages. It would start to load and then freeze. Long story short, after messing with it a bit, I checked my process list and found a dozen instances of Chrome running, none of them responding to input, so I had to kill them manually. After that, everything worked again.

The status messages where a status bar would be in Firefox sometimes overlap a part of the webpage. With a site like Facebook that places a menu at the bottom of the screen, this message will overlap the menu and make it temporarily inaccessible.

That's all I have for now ...

[RoyGBiv]

7. DEB Download Link

Also ...

I don't know if this is in a repository anywhere yet, but Google has both a DEB for Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives and a Fedora/SuSE RPM.

http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?platform=linux&hl=en

For Linux, you can download that and install it directly.