Chrome for the Mac: Still Waiting!

By  |  Monday, May 4, 2009 at 6:03 pm

Chrome IconIt’s been seven months now since Google released its Chrome browser for Windows and said that versions for OS X and Linux were in the works. In the time since then, Chrome has become the browser I turn to first when I’m using Windows. And when I’m using a Mac? Well, I spend a fair amount of time brooding about the absence of Chrome, not to mention the absence of any reliable information on when it might show up.

Charles Arthur of the Guardian did more than brood–he downloaded a developer build of Chrome for the Mac, and found it to be a work in progress. And it sounds like a lot more progress has to be made before the browser is ready for mass consumption–many basic features aren’t in place yet.

On one hand, it’s reassuring to know that Chrome for the Mac isn’t in limbo, but I’m now recalibrating my expectations for when it might arrive in a form that anyone’s going to use as a primary browser. I’m thinking it’s going to take months, not weeks, and I’ll be relieved if it’s ready before Chrome for Windows celebrates its first birthday.

 
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5 Comments For This Post

  1. gianpo Says:
    May 4th, 2009 at 6:46 pm

    Its BS that a version for mac hasn’t come out yet considering webkit is an apple technology.

  2. Camster Says:
    May 4th, 2009 at 9:15 pm

    At least you’ve got the Safari 4 beta for that tasty Webkit speed….

  3. Aktariel Says:
    May 4th, 2009 at 11:27 pm

    The hardest part of implementation if I understand correctly is sandboxing the render process, and making each tab an individual process.

    Check out Stainless (www.stainlessapp.com) in the meantime for a nice beta browser with one-process-per-tab-goodness and things like multiple sessions in the same browser.

    (I don’t work for them, I just think the browser is a nice tech demo.)

  4. Edmund Says:
    May 5th, 2009 at 3:29 am

    If you had read Ars Technica’s article ‘Chrome for OS X: State of the Browser’ (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/03/chromium-for-os-x-state-of-the-browser.ars) then you would already have known this. In the article, Google hinted at a public beta of Chrome for the Mac this fall.

  5. tom b Says:
    May 5th, 2009 at 7:04 am

    I’m enjoying Firefox 3.0.7. No worries; Chrome will come when it comes, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Mac version is better than the Windows version, just like you see with Firefox; they have a way better foundation to work with.