Tag Archives | Google

Holy Cow! It’s Chrome for the Mac! Right Now! Sort of!

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 16, 2008 at 1:56 am

For all you Macintosh freaks itching to try Google’s Chrome browser, the good news is that Google is working on a Mac version (as well as one for Linux). The bad news is that it’s not saying when it’ll arrive, even though cofounder Sergey Brin is supposedly just itching to get his hands one one. And the surprising news is that CodeWeavers beat Google to it.

Well, not exactly, but it’s still pretty entertaining. Chrome may be a Google product, but it’s Google’s version of an open-source project that the company initiated. The open-source version is called Chromium. And CodeWeavers, which produces software based on Wine, the open-source system for running Windows apps without Windows, decided to try its hand at using WINE to create Mac and Linux versions of Chromium. Both are now available for download. I snagged the Mac version, which takes a few minutes to initiate itself once you’ve downloaded and installed the program. And here it is, looking like the Chrome I’ve been using in Windows. (Actually, looking a bit too much like the Windows version: Those are Windows minimize/maximize/close buttons, not Mac ones.)

In answer to the question “Should I run CrossOver Chromium as my main browser?”, CodeWeavers’ FAQ provides a succinct and honest answer: “Absolutely not! This is just a proof of concept, for fun, and to showcase what Wine can do.”  You only need to spend a few minutes with CrossOver Chromium to see that CodeWeavers isn’t being inappropriately modest–fonts and formatting are kind of messed up, and if there’s a way to get Flash working, I haven’t figured it out. As the CodeWeavers blog points out, CrossOver Chromium can’t auto-update itself with security fixes, as Chrome can. And another sign of its Windows origins is the fact that it offers to import bookmarks and other settings from Internet Explorer–even though IE for the Mac is defunct, and Safari is the browser that a new Mac browser would appropriately ask about importing from.

It’s also unclear from CodeWeavers’ blog and FAQ whether it intends to refine CrossOver Chromium or leave it as is. Presumably that’s hard to say: If Google releases Chrome for Mac soon, CrossOver Chromium becomes redundant. But if it’s months and months before Chrome for Mac shows up, CodeWeavers’ browser might have an audience. If the company polishes it up…a lot.

For now, CrossOver Chromium is really a software toy that you’ll likely use for just a few minutes, then put away. But it is fun. And it does whet my appetite for a Mac version of Chrome–one, I hope, that’s even more fully evolved than the Windows one is at this early point in its existence.

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Google Puts Old Newspapers Online in Their Entirety

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 8, 2008 at 3:30 pm

I’m having a good time here at the DEMOfall conference in San Diego, but there’s stuff being announced at the TechCrunch50 back in San Francisco, too–and TechCrunch scored a coup this morning when Google’s Marissa Mayer used the conference to announce that the company is working with newspapers to make millions of pages of old newspapers searchable in their original form.

When I was in college, a few years before the Web came along, I spent lots of time in the library reading old newspapers in microform form, and what Google is doing here instantly reminded me of those days. In fact, it looks like Google’s newspaper archive is the somewhat grainy black-and-white photographs of papers I remember cranking through. Except now, you can do full-text searching of a vast repository of ’em.

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Googleversary: Our Coverage So Far, and a Poll

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 7, 2008 at 11:07 am

Tons of Web sites have chosen today to celebrate Google’s tenth anniversary. Google itself, as I write this, isn’t one of them. I assume it will mark the occasion at some point, presumably with a special logo on its homepage, as it’s done in the past. If it does, I’m sure it’ll be a far cooler commemorative logo than the one at the left, which I whipped up with the addictive Googlogo.

Until Google does something formal to acknowledge its birthday, this anniversary interview at the L.A. Times with the company’s Marissa Mayer is a decent substitute and a good read. And here’s a quick recap of Technologizer’s special coverage of a decade of Google:

Google 1998, Google 2008: A look at what Google looked like when it was just starting to be Google (amazingly like what today’s extremely experienced Google looks like, it turns out);

Twelve Bizarro Googles: A dozen weird Google variants, both official and unofficial…from Elmer Fudd Google to all-spam Google to backwards Google;

A World Without Google: Some thoughts on the company’s significance, and what the Web might be like if it had never existed.

Let’s end this with a T-Poll:

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A World Without Google

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 7, 2008 at 9:37 am

Ten years ago today, Google’s filing for incorporation as a business was accepted. It’s far from the only date one might choose to mark the company’s tenth birthday–and as I write this, I don’t see any celebrating going on at Google’s home page or corporate blog–but many Googlewatchers are doing their ruminating on Ten Years of Google right now. (I’ve already done some myself in my posts on bizarro Google offshoots and the company’s 1998 homepage.)

The first thought that jumped into my head when I pondered the anniversary was this: It’s only been that long? Google has become so core to how I live my life that I forget that I managed to spend thirty-four years without it–including twenty years of being online in one form or another. There just aren’t that many commercial products or services that have become anywhere near so pervasive. (Coca-Cola? McDonald’s? The Gillette safety razor?)

Once I started to think about life before Google, I began to toy with the idea of life without Google. What if the world had gotten to 2008 without the company ever being formed? (Maybe Sergey Brin and Larry Page had never been born; maybe they became Stanford professors; maybe they became fabulously successful at some other endeavor–I dunno.) Just how different would life–or at least life on the Internet–be?

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Twelve Bizarro Googles

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 6, 2008 at 1:05 am


When Google got going as a company–ten years ago this Sunday, by one method of accounting–it was an obscure latecomer in a market dominated by killer engines such as AltaVista and WebCrawler. It wasn’t all that long before it became an international obsession. And then it began inspiring what I like to think of as Bizarro Googles: Oddball alternate-universe parodies that, for the most part, actually function as search engines…usually providing real Google results, or subsets thereof.

Google has apparently been known to make trouble for Bizarro Googles when it feels that its trademark is being abused. But it is, among many other things, a company with a whimsical sense of corporate humor, and for the most part it seems content to let Bizarro Googles live in peace–and it’s even created some of its own.

So here, in humble tribute to a decade of Google, are my twelve favorite Bizarro Googles. Every one of them is ultimately a compliment to the world’s biggest search engine. After all, I don’t recall anyone caring enough to create Bizarro AltaVistas or Bizarro WebCrawlers-or, for that matter, any Bizarro AOLs, MSNs, or Yahoos…

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Happy Googleversary: Google 1998, Google 2008

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 5, 2008 at 1:26 pm

The most important company the Web has known to date is turning ten. When, exactly, is up for debate, depending how you do the math–but the blogosphere seems to have decided to mark the anniversary this weekend.

If you want to understand how a venerable Web site has evolved over the years, there’s no better tool than the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which caches old versions of sites. As with all sites it stores, the Wayback Machine’s record of Google’s history is imperfect–for one thing, many of its stored versions are missing the iconic Google logo. But it’s got some pages that do a good job of capturing Google in its very earliest days.

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Project Fakebar: Improvising a Google Toolbar Substitute for Chrome

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 4, 2008 at 10:59 pm

Two days ago, I mentioned that the wildly popular, extremely useful Google Toolbar didn’t work in Google’s Chrome browser. I said I missed it. So do  legions of other people, judging from the thousands of Toolbar fans who have read that post, and the 140 who have commented on it so far. Who knew that a humble toolbar could be so beloved?

I think it’s pretty much a given that Google will eventually either release a Toolbar for Chrome or essentially build in all of its functionality. But it’ll only happen on Google’s timetable, and I suspect it isn’t priority #1. And while Toolbar is cool, it’s not exactly advanced technology–what it does, mostly, is to provide fast access to various Google services.

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Dell Joins the Mini-Laptop Movement

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 4, 2008 at 10:50 am

Remember when laptops were big, heavy, and cost two or three thousand dollars? Most of the action at the moment involves undersized cheapie models like the eee PC, HP Mini-Note…and Dell’s new Inspiron.
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