Chrome browser comes to Linux, OS X
Posted in This Just In... on December 8th, 2009 by gkrakow
While we’re still on the subject of Google – have you ever tried their Web browser for big computers?
Google Chrome is a terrific alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Netscape’s Navigator or Firefox or Apple’s Safari.
But, until now, Chrome has been limited to the 90+% of all computer users whose machines run on Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista and 7). Not anymore.
As of today, a Beta version of Google Chrome is now available for Apple’s Unix-based Mac OS X and various forms of Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE). Beta means not everything works the way they’d like it to at the moment. But Google is proud of their product so far – and wants you to see just how far they’ve come so far.
The Google Chrome Web browser for Windows has always been known for speed and the new Beta versions are no exception. Not only does Chrome start faster than any other popular browser – but, nine times out of ten, it seems to load Websites and give you search results faster than other contenders.
Chrome also allows you to change your browser’s “look” with downloadable (and easily installable) style forms.
But the biggest of big deals is how Chrome integrates your search and navigation Web pages on the same page. It does so with user-configurable tabs which allow you to navigate to your favorite Web pages with just one click on a thumbnail of your most visited sites.
This is how Google explains their new tab page:
Chrome browser for Linux uses 60,000 lines of code written specifically for Linux – and has gone through 23 developer builds and 2,713 bug fixes (so far). The Google people are quite proud of their Beta software.
In a quick test, the Chrome Web browser installed in less than 45-seconds on my Lenovo netbook running the latest version of Ubuntu’s OS (version 9.10). I pressed one button and everything just installed perfectly (a far cry from what Linux installations used to be.)
Speed-wise, Chrome runs rings around Ubuntu’s standard Firefox browser. After a few hours use, I can say that so far, so good. It seems pretty stable and a joy to
use. Pretty good for Beta software.
The Chrome Web browser is the main building block for Google’s upcoming, Linux-based Chrome operating system. You should try it out now and start to get used to it. You’ll probably be seeing a whole lot more of Chrome on new devices in the very near future.