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Google's Chrome beta for Mac expected early December

A beta version of Google’s Chrome browser for the Mac is set to land in December. Mountain View had already gone on record to say that the test preview would arrive before the end of 2009. In a Chromium developer mailing list yesterday, the company’s Chrome product manager Nick Baum revealed that Google plans to release the …

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Steen Hive
Thumb Up

Dev. Version

Running a treat here on both my hacks. Fast, light, hasn't bombed at all afair.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

</SCEPTIC>

Got to say given their track record with Google Earth I was highly sceptical about Chrome for Linux, but I've been running the unstable release on Linux for a couple of months and I have to say I'm blown away. It's light, fast and stable. Install it and you get the deb repository configured straight away, plenty of apps that aren't in the official repositories can't manage that. And the updates just happen.

Sceptic no more.

Oh and FF fanbois? Sorry but it's better at blocking popups than FF is even when FF has APB. It's faster and much, much lighter than the bloatware that is FF 3.5. Unless FF 4.0 is a massive improvement it will be a no brainer when the Linux version gets it's stable release.

Mozilla got lazy with no real competion. Sure they had IE on Windoze (if you can call that competition) and Safari on Mac and we all know most Apple users would die rather than use a none apple branded product. So FF had no real competition when it came to users who really gave a shit which browser they used (yes Opera is great, but they don't seem to be able to make people aware of it). With the weight of Google behind it Chrome will go a long way to either making Mozilla wake up and get back with the program, or failing that kicking their arse completely. Sorry guys, what the majority of normal users* want is something that just browses the web. They don't want to fart around with plugins and such. Maybe Mozilla need to launch Firefox-lite. FF without the bloat would be a great browser.

*Normal users = people for whom their PC is just another appliance like the washing machine. They just want it to work when they switch it on.

Law
Happy

yey

Was a FF user until the memory hogging and load times made me drop it for safari, lately safari has been freezing alot when first loading web pages, so I tried the dev release of chrome (on osx) - I've only found one site that it has issues with - it's stable, fast, light, and impressive really.

My only problem is when you first install, it copies all your bookmarks from safari/firefox... but then the bookmark manager isn't part of the dev release - so I've not been able to remove the thousands of bookmarks I've got in the bookmark bar... with any luck, theres a manager in the beta! :D

/etc
Gates Horns

Wrong on several counts

@sceptic

"... we all know most Apple users would die rather than use a none apple branded product. So FF had no real competition when it came to users who really gave a shit which browser they used."

What a load of bollocks! Apple users don't buy because of the name or something. They just don't settle for less. But if you're prepared to put up with the kind of excuse for an OS that MS has been getting by on for years, I'm sure that's fine by Mac users, too.

As for "gave a shit", the point about Firefox on the Mac was that it was, to use your own word, really shitty. It's not so much now, since they got embarrassed and put a lot of work in -- but, boy, was it at one time. (And it's still a rather Windows-centric browser that sits on other OSes somewhat uncomfortably.)

However, Firefox still had a reasonable uptake on the Mac side even when the Mac version was far less polished than it is now. That was for the simple reason that a few years back AOL had put a fair bit of money in specifically for work on what's known as "compatibility" -- i.e. making the Gecko engine work with all the badly coded sites out there -- when they were thinking of using it in the AOL software instead of IE. WebKit -- which is what Safari (and, incidentally Chrome) uses -- took awhile to catch up. Safari also initially lacked as much JavaScript support as was necessary for some AJAX sites.

So you're wrong: plenty of Mac users did use Firefox -- even despite its poor platform integration and generally sloppy "fit and finish".

I mean why don't you come here and post a load of rubbish about platforms you know nothing about? That would be useful, wouldn't it?

Bilgepipe
Gates Horns

@/etc

Absolute agree. FF on OSX is, frankly, not very good. I recently switched to Safari and I don't miss FF at all, despite Safaris flaws and limitations.

Chrome on OSX is going to have to be really very good indeed to tempt me and a lot of other Mac users away from their current choice, and it's going to have to offer something they don't already have.

Windows users will, of course, settle for whatever mediocrity is put in front of them as is the norm.

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