Taking a peek inside Google Chromium
While Google's Chrome browser has gone through beta to a final release and back to beta on Windows, we're still waiting for solid word on the Linux release. We know it's coming, but what beyond that?
One nice thing about open-source, though, is that you don't have to stay entirely in the dark -- the source code, and the story it tells of a project's progress, is right there for anyone to inspect. The open-source version of Chrome now runs on Linux, and though it's very early in its development, I decided to take a peek.
Unpolished Chrome
The open-source project behind Chrome is called Chromium, and it's this that you can get running on Linux today. There are two basic ways of installing it: build the code yourself from scratch, or find an existing build and install that.
I opted for the latter, using the Chromium PPA for Ubuntu, a third-party repository with Chromium packages for Ubuntu that are re-built automatically each day.
Because the code is under continuous development, you never quite know what to expect when starting a Chromium build - it might well crash on start-up! It started just fine for me, appearing within a split-second of launching it, but as soon as I typed in a URL and hit Enter, it crashed. However, the welcome page that Chromium displays when you open it has a link to the Google Chrome website, and from there, I was able to find my way to the Google home page, which opened up access to all of my favourite websites.
While it was still quite crash-happy, as you'd expect from such an unfinished product, Chromium rendered most of the sites that I threw at it very well, and very quickly, with only a few minor issues.
Tabbed browsing worked as well, though the GUI to switch between tabs is unfinished, so I was only able to switch between them using the keyboard.
The lengthy to-do list
If nothing else, taking Chromium for a spin hammered home the fact that the first Linux beta of Chrome is a long way off. What we really have today is a rough, but already fairly competent port of Chrome's Webkit-derived rendering engine, wrapped in an almost completely unfinished user interface. There's no tab-switching interface, no privacy-enhanced Incognito windows, and certainly no bookmarks.
Chromium is definitely in no state to be used as any kind of day to day browser, and in fact, the developers have even stressed that user testing and bug reports won't help really yet - there are simply too many large, obvious bugs that need fixing before they can look at specific minor issues.
Performance anxiety?
It's also important to bear in mind that while Chromium is lightning-fast today, it's far too early to tell whether it will retain that performance in its final release. Software has a tendency to grow bigger and slower as it adds features, and Chromium has a lot of features left to add.
Meanwhile, Firefox is undergoing significant optimisation work, and Firefox 3.5, with a number of performance-boosting features, is going to arrive well before any Linux version of Chrome.
Despite any concerns, though, it's great to see Chrome taking its first steps on Linux, if just to reassure us all that it really is coming. When it finally appears in beta form, there's every chance that it's going to be an amazing browser.
Other Blog Entries written by Leigh Dyer:
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