
I know most of you guys have heard already about Chrome, the new shiny browser competitor from Google. Some of you have blog about it expressing how cool that new apps were. ‘slay had covered up about this application on three post on his blog as you can see it here, here, and here.
As you can see in ‘slay’s post, Chrome sure had some disadvantage (thanks for the britney-justin analogy). I never installed a Chrome before but I saw my friends use it. In main page there is a Opera’s speed dial like thumbnail. At first I thought it might be just same as Opera but for it was a thumbnail of most visited page by user for real. This one reallly-really a drawbacks and I hope Google will fix it up for next release of Chrome.
Couple days after Chrome for windows released, Google had announce Chromium project which is a project to port Chrome browser to platform that other than Windows. Developers can download the the source code of Chrome and compile it on their system to test the application. Somehow, currently there is no working Chromium browser thats mean if you ever compile it, nothing GUI like form to be appear when you execute the application. Thats why I never bothered myself to download the code and testing it.
And today while Im searching for some tech news on open source I had found an article about Crossover Chromium, a project from Crossover inc (guess it) to get Chrome running on Linux and Mac. I download a binary for my Linux distribution to test it out and this post is actually is written while Im testing the software. Crossover Chromium used wine to get Chrome running. Wine is a project where it implement windows library on Linux and Mac so any Windows application can run in both platform. Somehow wine needs more improvement because it is not guaranteed that all Windows application can run especially games which most of it used DirectX.
Back to the Crossover Chromium, you can see from the screen which I took after testing browsing this blog. From my own opinion, I don’t really like ‘wine-zise’ application it is somewhat horrible in apearence. But Google sure depend to wine to port their application to Linux and Mac. You can see it from Google Picasa for Linux also used wine to get it running. Im not really sure if other Google application for Linux also used wine like Google Earth. Google aims to produce a native Chrome to Linux and Mac so I think I have to wait for this. But before that, Crossover does not need to rename the application to Chromium because this is not the real Chromium but a converted Chrome so it can just run on other platform.