The beta version of Chrome for Mac OS X is available. Google released its browser beta for Linux too.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Two key pieces of Google's effort to make Chrome a more competitive browser fell into place on Tuesday as Google released beta versions of the browser for Mac OS X and Linux.
Tuesday's software release is a version of Chrome that had previously been available only as developer preview software for Mac and Linux machines. "It took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it," product manager Brian Rakowski said in a blog post.
Macs are widely used, if not as common as Windows machines, and there's been some demand in tech circles for the Mac version of Chrome. Linux, while less widely used among ordinary computer users, has importance of its own: it's the foundation for Chrome OS. That's the browser-based operating system Google hopes will be popular on Netbooks starting next year.
According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta versions are scheduled to graduate to the next level of maturity, "stable," on January 12. Chrome for Windows graduated out of beta almost exactly a year ago.
Google doesn't emphasize product version numbers in the project, instead automatically delivering updates behind the scenes to the browser that take effect when it's restarted. But it does use version milestones to keep track of development internally.
The biggest new feature of Chrome 4.0 is support for extensions, which let people customize the browser. In the Mozilla world, they're called add-ons, and they've been a big part of Firefox's success.
Mac OS X has a mandatory menu bar, so unlike the Windows version, Chrome on the Mac has traditional menus.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Extensions aren't useful, though, unless people can find them. Google on Tuesday also launched a Chrome extensions gallery page.
There are more than 300 extensions available for Chrome, extensions programmers Aaron Boodman and Erik Kay said in a blog post.
However, extensions on the Mac aren't yet available, though they had been for a time in the developer-preview version. "Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon," Rakowski said.
Also on the Chrome for Mac to-do list: a bookmark manager, PDF viewing in the browser, bookmark synchronization, 64-bit support, and my personal favorite differentiator of Firefox 3.6 on the Mac, full-screen support.
Chrome now has an extensions gallery.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Why try Chrome?
For those of you new to Chrome, here's a brief version of why it's my default browser on both Windows and, as of about a month ago, Mac OS X. Your preferences and needs may vary, of course, and I still use Firefox every day, too.
• Speed. It's fast to start up, though not quite as snappy as it once was now that it's not so bare-bones, and rivals are making progress. It's also fast loading Web pages and running JavaScript programs on them.
• Tabs. I spawn innumerable new tabs all day long, and when it takes a long time (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer), I get infuriated. I also like the order in which new tabs arrive, a style Firefox is mimicking.
• The omnibox. It's a single bar that merges the utility of an address bar and search bar. I hit Ctrl-L (on Windows) or Command-L (on Mac) to pop my cursor up there, and start typing. One nice--if somewhat obscure--feature is fast site search on some domains, so for example I can type A, M, tab, and up pops an Amazon.com icon; what I type afterward is entered as a search on Amazon. That conveniently gets me straight to the search results so I don't have to see yet another Kindle ad.
• A minimal user interface. When browsing, I like my user interface to step aside and make way for the Web page. Scrolling was a wonderful innovation in computers a few decades ago, but I like to avoid it when I can. Chrome puts tabs in the real estate ordinarily devoted to a program's title bar and shuffles the menu controls off to the right of that tab strip (though the Mac version gets a regular menu bar).
Another potential perk: avant-garde Web technology, including WebGL and O3D for accelerated 3D graphics and Native Client for speeding up Web apps with direct access to a processor, are being built into Chrome. Another such Google project, Gears, is already built into Chrome--though Gears doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.6.
There are things you might miss--the full panoply of Firefox extensions, toolbars from Google or others, print preview. And the "browser not supported" error messages on various Web pages are annoying, though in my experience there's rarely an actual compatibility problem. Overall, I like it.
Is Google spying on me?
If you're worried about what new data Google will be able to harvest on you, I recommend a close read of Google's Chrome privacy page. This doesn't worry me much, but I may be insufficiently paranoid. In my opinion, the biggest thing is that Google stores 2 percent of the data it gathers when people type text into Chrome's combination search and address bar, called the omnibox.
That means Google can see not only what you're searching for (as it would for any Google search), but what Web site addresses you're typing as well. The data is anonymized within 24 hours, Google said.
Also, Chrome has a feature called DNS pre-fetching that tracks down the Internet server addresses on Web pages in anticipation that you'll be clicking links on the page. So Chrome--and Google, too, if you're using Google Public DNS--retrieves this information from the Internet.
Updated at 12:30 p.m. PST and 1:20 p.m.. Added further detail.
Google plans to release a Mac beta of Chrome in early December, judging by some chatter on a mailing list for the browser.
Chrome 4.0 is available today as a beta version for Windows but only as a rougher developer-preview version on Linux and Mac OS X. The standout feature of the new version is customization through extensions, a technology that long has been a core asset of another open-source browser, Firefox.
Google has been moving to a new extensions presentation technology called Browser Actions that let people interact with extensions through a small button toward the upper right of the browser window. "We've noticed that many of you have updated your extensions to take advantage of the new UI. We'd like to encourage the rest of you to do so as well," said Nick Baum, a Google Chrome product manager, in a mailing list posting.
But here's the hitch: Browser Actions only work on Windows and Linux right now. That means those building extensions will leave Mac Chrome users behind for a time. But in telling those developers they won't have long to wait, Baum mentioned the deadline for the beta version.
"The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December," he said.
And Google is on the case for adding Browser Actions to the Mac version of Chrome.
"We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that," Baum said. "If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"
(Credit:
Apple)
Like most Apple updates, we suspect that the new beta 3 includes several stability and performance enhancements that might make the beta more pleasing to use, if you are testing it.
We've heard from some early beta testers complaining (see article comments) about the number of issues they were experiencing with the previous releases.
It is too early to tell what kinds of changes have been made in beta 3, but we suspect that it will not take long for people to discover them.
CNET had additional coverage about iPhone OS 3.0 here, here, here, and here.
World of Apple has republished the seed notes for the iPhone Beta 3 SDK, listing changes made to various components, such as Xcode, Interface Builder, and Dashcode.
Developers and beta testers, let us know about your experiences with this latest iPhone OS 3.0 beta in the comments.
January was a good month for both the emerging Windows 7 and the venerable Mac OS, according to Web metrics company Net Applications.
The Mac OS is now hovering around the 10 percent mark among operating systems accessing the Web.
In its Operating System Market Share report for January, Net Applications showed the Mac OS at 9.93 percent, up from 9.63 percent in December. The iPhone also trended upward to 0.48 percent in January, from 0.44 percent in December.
January figures from Net Applications on operating system share amid Internet use.
(Credit: Net Applications)In its recap of the Net Applications numbers, Fortune highlighted the ground gained by Apple's iPod Touch:
The biggest winner in January, however, was the iPod touch, whose "explosive" growth in December continued unabated after the holidays, growing 37.5% to reach a 0.11% Internet share...That means that more than one out of every 1,000 Web hits in January were made from iPod touches -- at least according to Net Applications' data.
Use of Windows 7, meanwhile, surged in January after Microsoft released the public beta of the operating system, the follow-on to Windows Vista that's due sometime around the end of 2009.
The beta became available January 10 (though not without some stumbling), up to which point Windows 7 stood at about 0.04 percent. Through most of the rest of the month, it fluctuated at between roughly 0.12 percent and 0.15 percent. It closed out the month with a jump to 0.23 percent on January 31, according to Net Applications' breakout on Windows 7.
(Credit:
Net Applications)
That January 31 jump may have come from people who still thought that would be the last day to get the beta. But about a week ago, Microsoft extended the window for the downloads, saying the Windows 7 beta is available through February 10.
But on the whole, Windows continued to inch downward. The Net Applications report for January, released Sunday, put the Microsoft operating system at 88.26 percent, down from 88.68 percent in December. That's still plenty good enough, of course, to keep Windows in the No. 1 spot. Linux came in third at 0.83 percent in January, essentially the same as its 0.85 percent December showing.
Net Applications accumulates its data from 160 million monthly visitors to its network of hosted Web sites that collect statistics.
Emboldened by my success in getting Windows 7 to run on a Mac Mini using Boot Camp, I decided to press my luck. So Wednesday night, I took my Windows 7 beta disk home and set out to load it onto a virtual machine on my iMac.
Audio
Talking Windows 7
CNET News' Ina Fried discusses Windows 7 with CNET technology analyst Larry Magid
Download mp3 (1MB)
Having used Parallels successfully in the past to run Vista, I decided to give VMware's Fusion a try--my first experience with the product. Getting up and running was relatively straightforward, a process aided by the fact that VMware lets you enter information such as your password and product key at the outset--handling the rest of the install process by itself.
Although Windows 7 is not officially supported, VMware does have a helpful blog post up on how to install it.
What I found was that Windows 7 loaded on my iMac, even without having a full 1GB of memory to dedicate to the virtual machine. But although I got Windows 7 in body, I felt as if I had lost the spirit of the operating system. The two things I like the most about Windows 7--its zippiness and its graphics--were muted in the virtual experience.
After weeks of enjoying near-instant boot times, it was torture to find myself with the XP experience of having to turn on the machine, then go get a cup of coffee while it finished loading.
In fairness, I might have had a different experience, had I loaded it onto a particularly beefy Mac capable of devoting 1GB or more of memory just to the virtual machine. My iMac has just 1GB of memory total, so I gave half of that over to VMware, a choice that no doubt crimped the speed of both the Mac and the virtual machine.
Even still, I was able to do a lot on my virtual Windows 7 machine. I used it to watch the U-Haul police chase that I had missed. Not only was I able to check in on Facebook, I was able to play the Boggle-like Scramble game to which I am addicted (and the performance was acceptable).
I loaded Firefox on to the machine so that I could use CNET's blogging tool. Despite my fear of writing directly into the tool (not a good idea, even when not running a beta operating system in a virtual machine), it worked just fine.
Overall, I'd say Windows 7 on my iMac falls into the category of "I definitely can, but I'm not sure that I'd really want to." With Windows machines so cheap, I'm not sure that one isn't better off getting a Netbook and having it sit next to their Mac, if they really need to run a Windows app or two.
For more of my thoughts on Windows 7, check out the Editors' Office Hours segment I did earlier this week. I've included the video above.
- prev
- 1
- next
