Chrome for Mac has "very long way to go"

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 13 Feb 2009 at 14:57

A Google engineer working on porting Chrome to the Mac has admitted the team still has a "very, very long way to go."

Speaking on his blog, Google engineer Mike Pinkerton confirmed that the Mac Chrome interface "was up and limping" and that the team now had the ability to "load web pages in the renderer processes and display them in tabs."

However, Pinkerton poured cold water on any hopes that the Mac version of the browser was close to an appearance by admitting that "clicking doesn't work, and the renderers crash like nobody's business, but the other great thing is that the user interface stays running even if they do. Just open a new tab and keep going."

According to Pinkerton, part of the reason it's taken so long to get the Mac version of Chrome to this point is that the WebKit version that ships with Mac OS X doesn't support running tabs as individual processes, a key element of Chrome.

"It took a lot of work to marshal it to do so. In addition, the UI clearly needs much love, but it's an indicator of the clean and simple direction we're heading," he says.

The Mac version of Chrome was originally down for release in the first half of 2009, but Pinkerton refused to speculate on a date.

Click to find out why Mozilla believes that separate processes aren't actually that good an idea and what to expect from Firefox 3.2.