vansmith
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Hey everyone,
This is for anyone interested in the development process behind Chromium and eventually Google Chrome for OS X.
After reading an article on Ars Technica about the evolution of Chromium for OS X, I decided to do what they did and build it from source. This is something you do while you are away from the computer - not that it took a really long time (it did take a while though) but it takes a toll on system resources.
I did two builds, Debug and Release. The Debug release was ~ 86MB which is considerably larger than the size of Firefox 3.0.8 (50MB), Safari 4 beta (13.3MB) and Opera 9.64 (15.3MB). It was really buggy - I had to hold down the power button to turn off the computer after it locked up OS X and prevented me from doing anything. The Release build is much better - it's only 26MB and will actually quit and respond to my requests.
As for the experience itself, it renders pages well and quite fast. Many of the functions of the browser are still under heavy development so you may notice things missing if you give it a try. At this point, Acid3 scores 100/100 but fails the linktest. No history is recorded and you can't open a local file but you can bookmark sites. It appears to use Cocoa widgets on the pages which is nice from an integration standpoint.
That's about it for now. I'll let you guys know if there is anything else noteworthy after some more tests as my testing is fairly limited at this point. If I can figure out the licensing scheme (it says BSD plus some other licenses) and whether I'm allowed to distribute it, I'll put it up for you guys to test for yourself in case you don't want to waste to time, don't have Xcode installed or both.
Obligatory screenshot:
EDIT: If you want to tackle this yourself, have lot's of space available. After doing the Debug and Release builds, the source folder was 8GB. Yes, 8GB. Also, to add to what I said earlier, you can't maximize the window as the maximize button is greyed out.
This is for anyone interested in the development process behind Chromium and eventually Google Chrome for OS X.
After reading an article on Ars Technica about the evolution of Chromium for OS X, I decided to do what they did and build it from source. This is something you do while you are away from the computer - not that it took a really long time (it did take a while though) but it takes a toll on system resources.
I did two builds, Debug and Release. The Debug release was ~ 86MB which is considerably larger than the size of Firefox 3.0.8 (50MB), Safari 4 beta (13.3MB) and Opera 9.64 (15.3MB). It was really buggy - I had to hold down the power button to turn off the computer after it locked up OS X and prevented me from doing anything. The Release build is much better - it's only 26MB and will actually quit and respond to my requests.
As for the experience itself, it renders pages well and quite fast. Many of the functions of the browser are still under heavy development so you may notice things missing if you give it a try. At this point, Acid3 scores 100/100 but fails the linktest. No history is recorded and you can't open a local file but you can bookmark sites. It appears to use Cocoa widgets on the pages which is nice from an integration standpoint.
That's about it for now. I'll let you guys know if there is anything else noteworthy after some more tests as my testing is fairly limited at this point. If I can figure out the licensing scheme (it says BSD plus some other licenses) and whether I'm allowed to distribute it, I'll put it up for you guys to test for yourself in case you don't want to waste to time, don't have Xcode installed or both.
Obligatory screenshot:
EDIT: If you want to tackle this yourself, have lot's of space available. After doing the Debug and Release builds, the source folder was 8GB. Yes, 8GB. Also, to add to what I said earlier, you can't maximize the window as the maximize button is greyed out.