Google Cofounder On Lack of Mac Chrome Browser: 'It's Embarrassing'

[ohbrilliance]

What a bunch of whiners! Google isn't obliged to make a version for Mac *at all*. Personally, I'm damn excited about Chrome. As a developer I can see the huge potential of creating a web platform from scratch.

After watching the video I doubt Brin was sincere with his 'emarrasing' remark. It was an off-the-cuff remark. How could he be embarrassed when there wasn't even a plan to complete the Mac and Win versions at the same time? It's clear that they wanted to get one GUI done and out there so that the core bugs could be ironed out.

Since Google hasn't even commenced the GUI on the Mac I'd be surprised if it's out in only a few months. What Google are building with Chrome is a MAMMOUTH task. To put it in perspective, Firefox is based on code going back more than a decade.

As for 'giving back' due to Webkit - well that originated in KDE. I don't see a Safari for KDE.

 

[Catfish_Man]

really? then what is the event behind a key press triggering a browser operation?

are u saying key command will still work when javascript is disabled?

is here any examples so I can check it out?

See KeyboardEvent.cpp in WebCore. It's part of the DOM bindings, which you can sorta think of as an automatically loaded library for javascript on the web. If you run JavaScriptCore/SpiderMonkey/V8 from a non-web context (say, the jsc interactive interpreter) it's not loaded though.

 

[SactoGuy18]

I hate to break out the news, but we're all forgetting that Windows is still over 85% of the market for new and installed base of desktop and laptop computers. As such, Google needs to get that market satisfied first, and hopefully by Macworld in January 2009 we'll see a version of Chrome running natively under MacOS X 10.4 or later.

 

[cyberakuma]

I'm struggling to see why it would take so long.

Webkit is (obviously) already running on OSX. The new Javascript engine should be platform agnostic (if not, someone should lose their job!). A competent programmer could put together a custom window class in a week.

Ok, "crash control" might be tricky, but other than that I really can't see why it would take even a month.

The logic is cross-platform but the UI layer isn't. Think of the Chrome/Chromium UI as it exists today exactly on windows; vista-ish look and feel, no menus, square buttons. I do not know what they use for the UI, but no windows browser (including IE) uses native controls, the built-in buttons are nowhere near good enough to be able to represent all the styles available through CSS. So chances are they have to port the drawing code before they can even think about making aqua-esque buttons. Also consider that if they are not using carbon/cocoa for the drawing code (how could they on windows, really?) that they also are missing system integration points like clipboard interaction.

Normally if you were going to port an app, you would split out the business logic from the presentation, and have a windows presentation, mac presentation, linux presentation, and so on. Well, a browser (excluding javascript) is nothing _but_ presentation. Coming up with a respectable port takes time. Firefox hasn't managed to do it on the mac after several years, but they at least now seem to realize they should be trying.

 

[cyberakuma]

Re: Google Cofounder On Lack of Mac Chrome Browser: 'It's Embarrassing'

Also, a side point - Google probably came out with a windows browser first because the desktop browser market is saturated - the only way to gain share is to take it from someone else. Whether you consider Microsoft to 'deserve' it or not, its in Google's best interest (business wise) to attempt to reduce market share of the least standards-compliant and interoperable browser out there, which coincidentally happens to have the largest market share.

A mac version would provide more options on the platform for sure, but can only take market share away from Google's business partners!

I think the comment could be interpreted a few different ways: for one, it could be 'embarrassing' the the google cofounder cannot run the browser because he has a mac. But more likely, its 'embarrassing' because so many of Google's other "products" are completely cross platform, because they are on the web. For google to only provide a browser to access those products on windows is contrary to that, and I'm sure they will work on fixing it.

 

[hagjohn]

I agree that they need to polish the app, no doubt about it. This is Google, and they know the browser needs to be amazing from day one.

But WHY release the Windows version now, rather than keeping that a secret until all 3 were ready?

They are scared of the IE8's "porno" mode will lock them out of all tracking.

Use it on my vista64 box and it's great. Its fast and very simplistic but that's what so nice about it.

 

[csketch7]

i dont care

guys i have parralles i can run it so i couldnt care less but it is so much better than firefox mabe safari

 

[camsoft]

Good. I can ignore it then and tell people our site works in safari and if it does not in google chrome I can forward them to google tech support!

Ok, this thread is starting to annoy me so I need to add my comments.

1) Chrome uses the WebKit source code, that means they have taken the rendering engine and integrated it into Chrome, BUT this does not mean they won't change it. They mentioned on one of the developer blogs that any security bugs they fix will be released back into the WebKit community and Apple, so that both browsers can take advantage.

2) Chrome is much faster, one post on here says that Chrome's JavaScript benchmarks come out slower than Firefox and Safari. I don't know what benchmark you were using but I found it to be 3 times faster than Firefox and Safari. I ran the Sun Spider benchmarks, it was 36 times faster than IE.

3) IE 4 was a big deal back in the day. Not now and we now see it as a flawed browser, but at the time because I remember, it was a major break through and destroyed Netscape. Microsoft released 5 and 5.5 which were minor updates but fixed a lot of bugs. IE6 was the one where Microsoft dropped the ball and got complacent.

 

[Billy Boo Bob]

I wasn't impressed with Chrome's rendering so far... Have you tried applying any of the WebKit based CSS effects? Like rounded corners and dropshadows? It's pretty messy.

 

[brucku]

no

I'm confused... wasn't the whole point of OSX and Universal Binary so programs could be written in one language and work on OSX and Windows?

No. The word "universal" referred to code being written in Motorola Standard G4/G5 (whatever the architecture is called) or x86 code. Not windows/OSX.

 

[qubex]

Matter of months? Wow. That is not just "embarrassing"...that is unacceptable. Given the work Apple has done with Google and the fact that Chrome is a freaking WebKit based browser, a Mac version is a no brainer!

Bombast aside, this statement indicates you do not have any kind of understanding of programming. Porting WebKit is the least of the problems: the main issue will be porting all the process-separation stuff, which is inherently system-dependent. All the work the Chrome team has done to ensure every tab runs in a separate process cannot be ported as-is from Windows to other platforms, it has to be rebuilt from the same specifications for another architecture.

If things were as trivial as you imply, surely the Google behemoth would've done so already? It isn't simple, and the only thing worse than delay is rushing out a flawed port of what is supposed to be a "secure" browser. Imagine the hilarity if the Mac version Google's crash-proof and secure browser were found to be unsafe and crashing regularly.

 

[clevin]

See KeyboardEvent.cpp in WebCore. It's part of the DOM bindings, which you can sorta think of as an automatically loaded library for javascript on the web. If you run JavaScriptCore/SpiderMonkey/V8 from a non-web context (say, the jsc interactive interpreter) it's not loaded though.

thanks for the explanation, Im not sure I completely understand, but I will do some research later when I got time on this topic.

Ok, this thread is starting to annoy me so I need to add my comments.

1) Chrome uses the WebKit source code, that means they have taken the rendering engine and integrated it into Chrome, BUT this does not mean they won't change it. They mentioned on one of the developer blogs that any security bugs they fix will be released back into the WebKit community and Apple, so that both browsers can take advantage.

indeed, thats why there is a unfork process, but webcore has changed a lot since then, and consider couple of years ago, how difficult was apple towards contribute codes back to KHTML, Im not sure the unfork will be easy and straightforwards.

2) Chrome is much faster, one post on here says that Chrome's JavaScript benchmarks come out slower than Firefox and Safari. I don't know what benchmark you were using but I found it to be 3 times faster than Firefox and Safari. I ran the Sun Spider benchmarks, it was 36 times faster than IE.

that just tells you javascript speed isn't as important as somebody want us think is.
I don't give Chrome any advantages on speed except one, which is a very important one, the speed of the program, its super fast to start, to operate, etc, other than that, ther should be no difference in page rendering.

 

[aapl.jlo]

Don't expect to see me ever using their browser. I draw the line at gmail, and I am for sure not going to download something onto MY MAC so that Google can two years in the future have all of my information that I didn't want them to have. They have done it in the past, they'll do it again. Google is intrusive, I'm not giving them a foothold into my computer!

 

[blouis79]

[...]
Even where I work, 80% of the engineers are on a Mac when the site gets a large percentage of Windows users. This is very common.
[...]

I saw a Google spot on the TV news last week, talking about innovative HR practices. The Google engineers showed all appeared to be using MacBook Pros.

Surely they would try to use platform neutral tools?

Seriously embarrassing.

 

[Emkooda]

It is embarrassing. Mac users may represent a small percentage of the market, but we tend to be enthusiastic about new technologies, and for google to be so complacent about our access to their products is very frustrating. Google Earth also took far too long to come to the mac.

Let's hope their policy on this changes soon.