Google Chrome for Linux and Mac: A Sneak Peak

I have been waiting to run Chrome for Linux ever since Chrome was first released. Chrome, if you have not used it yet, is the fastest web browser available for use right now. I love it. However, until just about recently, there hasn't been a release of it that you could use to run on Linux. On June 4, the Google developers released their Chrome versions for Linux and Mac. They are in a very, very rough state right now, but to compensate they are also very, very fast.

I downloaded their developer release using two systems running Linux. The first system used Ubuntu 9.04 and the other used MEPIS 8. These are both Debian based Linux systems, and these are the only options since Chrome is only available for 64 and 32 bit versions in DEB.

During testing, though Chrome was easily installed on both systems, on the MEPIS system, it could not connect to network devices, so I had to drop that for now. On the Ubuntu system, I was able to run smoothly. This system was a Gateway 503 GR featuring a 300GB SATA HD, ATI Radeon 250, 2GB of RAM, and a 3 Gig Pentium IV processor. To say that it ran smoothly before is an understatement, it ran with burning speed.

Despite this, take note that this IS a rough version still. The HTML and CSS scripts rendered pretty terribly. There were columns that did not line up and there were many artifacts on each page that I tried.

As a disclaimer, the Google Chrome developers have warned us not to download this software unless you are a developer as well. Either that or you enjoy unpredictable, incomplete, potentially crashing programming.

Chrome has yet to crash on me, but as far as rendering web sites everything else that may have gone wrong has. Everything that is, except for running at anything other than blazing fast speeds.

As a brief summary here is what is not working on the current alpha version Google Chrome: media players, security settings, printing, plug-ins, Firefox bookmarks, etc. The full list, if you are so interested, is available Chromium issues page.

As a developer using this alpha version of Chrome, it feels as if I am using a broken down bike and traveling at 40mph. Though it may be a junkyard bike, I have to be impressed by its speed. Let's just hope I don't crash.