There are builds of Chromium for Linux. It's just in pre-alpha and lack everything except for very basic functionality (no tabs yet). So far, the omnibar works, pages render well, and it feels very fast.
A significant amount of work is going into both those builds but a lot more is needed. As much as I love having a multiprocess browser the V8 JS engine is the real heart of gold of chrome, and that is cross platform. Just nothing uses it besides chrome as far as I know. I do know that the next Mozilla JS engine feels to me at least (and if you benchmark different apps) just as fast. So the next firefox will be on par with speed and it will be cross platform. It will just have tabs that are not as cool.
As I recall, the bleeding-edge Safari, Firefox, and Chrome JS engines are all pretty competitive. IE and Opera are behind in public, but Opera is writing a new engine. The multiprocess structure and UI are the only real advantages Chrome has left from my point of view.
Well, FF 3.1 (or 3.5, whatever) will have an improved tabbing system, including the ability to drag tabs out of the window to create new windows, etc, but they will still lack the inherent feature that, IMO, makes Chrome a real innovator: per-tab processes. That's really the single-biggest feature that I would love to see in Firefox.
If not for a few must-have plugins that keep me coming back to Firefox, and of course the lack of Linux support, I would have switched to Chrome the moment it came out on that single feature alone.
Chrome is much more than I had hoped for. There are only 2 disappointments with it for me:
* where are the plugins?
* where are the linux / mac builds.
In both cases the waiting has gone on too long to be credible any more. However everything else about it has been wonderful and despite its low market share it has really set a new benchmark for speed and responsiveness that all the other vendors are paying attention to.
"too long to be credible"? Seriously? A handful of developers build Chrome in an incredibly short period of time. They choose to built it for the largest platform. They have rolled out dozens of revisions. The product is stable and solid and beautiful. And you seriously are going trash them for taking their time with lower priority features such as Mac support?
The problem with this thinking is that the serious computer users, the early adopters who are the ones that go out and tell the uncaring masses what to use, are increasingly on Mac or Linux. My parents don't use FF because it's better, they use it because I told them it was better and installed it for them. I'm on a Mac, I can't use Chrome, so the odds of me telling them to now switch away from FF (or of telling users who are still on IE to switch to Chrome instead of FF) are pretty low.
The problem with your thinking is that you assume Google really cares about how many Chrome users it has.
I'm sure that the Chrome team would be absolutely stoked to have a lot of users, but strategically, it simply doesn't matter. The goal here is to advance the state of the art in browsers. Performance, stability, and security (in terms of process isolation) were and still are lacking in all other browsers compared to Chrome. This is very much about pushing the state of the web, not about gaining market share. Google Chrome delivers in this regards.
I seriously doubt that Google doesn't care about market share for this thing that they've invested in. Strategically, what good is advancing the state of the art in browsers if people don't migrate to it?
Expanding on this a bit: we all know and love Google, but its a business, and one that basically supports the existence of another browser by paying to be the default search engine used in one of that browser's interface widgets. It's not an insignificant amount, either (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9804156-7.html); there's no way they paid that much to develop Chrome. Keep that money in house, make the shareholders happy; keep Chrome open source, keep the hackers happy. Why wouldn't they want users to start adopting Chrome instead of FF?
Sorry, I was away for a day or two after writing this so couldn't respond.
What I mean by not credible is simply that they implied upon release that Chrome would be a cross platform product and that mac & linux versions would come really soon. It's clear now that wasn't true. They tried to hype the geek crowd to get more street cred, but that original impression is no longer credible.
I completely agree it's a solid and beautiful product (it is my default browser) and really am quite in awe of what they pulled off.
Yah and that "handful" happens to be the hand picked team that used to be the Google Firefox development team. Not exactly a random group of developers hacking on their free time. These guys have been doing Browser work for a long time and knew exactly what they were getting into.
Chrome is a project that is over two and a half years old. Not many would say that is an "incredibly short period of time". It is going to take another year before Linux/OS X support is stable. That is more then three years. Take a look at the Linux code. They are reworking strings, keyboard events, clipboard, window management, pretty much everything. It is like starting work on a whole new application. There is a reason why so many people buy Qt licenses (or use the lgpl version these days), cross platform isn't exactly easy.
From conversations I have had with hackers:
- Google acts like they are all Linux developers, but at least the Chrome team used Visual Studio and use Windows primarily. They don't seem to care about my platform so why should I care about their app?
- Google ports webkit to Android and then separately to Chrome, clearly they have extra resources to burn, but not for a Linux/OS X port so it must be really low on their list.
- Internally all the Linux Google devs knew about Chrome for two years, but didn't bother to help in their 20% free time. Not even to help make it compile. If all of them didn't find Chrome worth their time (and they are all really smart guys) they must know something.
- Apple, the company that locks you down to their platform more then Microsoft has a cross platform browser! Opera and Firefox are on all three. Even the little Arora browser is cross platform. A new browser that wants to be big cannot have cross platform be an afterthought as it clearly was with Chrome.
Chrome is cool yes, I have hacked on the code and even submitted patches to help get it compiling on Linux. It has a lot of nice things going for it design wise and it will do ok in the long run, but as it is today sitting only on Windows it is very hard to attract the early adopters, the ones who buy every new geek toy and tells all their friends about it. Once it can get past this hump it will do ok. The marketing seems to indicate that this early adopter group the very group they are trying to attract and yet the product as it is today is really for mainstream joe average users. It really is no surprise when the early adopter group trashes a product that isn't useable for them. HackerNews isn't exactly known for being a Windows hangout.
There is a lot to cleanup in the Chrome source and I wouldn't be surprised if the next twelve months (minimum) was spent cleaning up all the windows specific code before they can really start on new and innovative features. They decided their technical debt would be Windows during initial development and now they are paying it. But they are a good team with smart developers. Or as I heard from someone else: Chrome is a snowball at the top of a hill. It might be not much now, but with google's cash behind it Chrome will keep on rolling down the hill and getting bigger and eventually you will have to deal with it.
Its not as simple as that. Most computer users are not educated on the browser options. IE is the standard for internet browsing because it comes with their computer.
Is it just me or is Google Chrome not properly displaying feeds? This is really annoying. For example, when I click on http://news.ycombinator.com/rss I see a garbled rendition of the feed. Any other browser I'ver tried displays a subscribe page with each feed entry properly formatted.
Google pushed dozens of patches transparently in the background. My understanding is that you could have every different tab running a different version if you kept them open over long periods of time.
The video-related crashes totally disappeared for me within the first month of use. The Gmail related crashes disappeared shortly after that. I haven't seen it crash since and I use it almost exclusively.
