Google Chrome for Mac released (beta) | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome for Mac released (beta)

google.com

92 pointsjsdalton59 comments

The email they sent to announce the beta (if you signed up to get it) has some interesting stats:

  Hi there,
  
  Thanks for signing up to hear from us regarding Google Chrome for Mac! We're excited to let you know that Google Chrome is now available in beta for Mac OS X.

  Here are a few fun facts from us on the Google Chrome for Mac team:

  -73,804 lines of Mac-specific code written
  -29 developer builds
  -1,177 Mac-specific bugs fixed
  -12 external committers and bug editors to the Google Chrome for Mac code base, 48 external code contributors
  -64 Mac Minis doing continuous builds and tests
  -8,760 cups of soft drinks and coffee consumed
  -4,380 frosted mini-wheats eaten
  Thanks for waiting and we hope you'll give Google Chrome for Mac a whirl.

  Google Chrome Team
  www.google.com/chrome

The 8.43:1 ratio of LoC to soft drinks/coffee consumed made me laugh.

two spaces

  like this.

...but for a bullet list...

* Use a leading asterisk

* Separate the list items by a blank line (i.e. make them separate paragraphs)

- Leading dashes work too.

Thanks for that, looks a little cleaner now.

Linux too!

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/w00t.html

A fine tribute to XKCD. Good to see Google give credit (and a direct link!) to XKCD right on the page, too.

If you want custom themes beyond what Google provides, I'm hawking a tool a hacked together a couple of weekends ago. It's a just-for-fun thing so the UI is pretty sparse, but it works! :)

http://sexychrome.com

I'm a big fan of Chrome. Favorite features include the speed, full-screen browsing, detachable tabs. Needs a robust extension for CSS inspection/manipulation, though. Built in one doesn't quite flow as well as Firebug. Decent JS console.

Unfortunately, it shares Firefox's sloppy page scroll performance. Bleh. Guess I'll be sticking with Safari.

and it shares safari's inability to view XML documents. What's with that...

There's an extension for that: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gbammbheopgpmaag...

XML View plugin for Safari - http://www.entropy.ch/blog/Mac+OS+X/2009/02/09/Safari-Plugin...

Intel only. Looks like I'll be sticking with Stainless (http://www.stainlessapp.com/) -- probably would've stuck with it anyway, it's a pretty nifty little Mac browser.

V8 was i386-only for a long time, it's had x86_64 and ARM support for maybe 6 months. Android originally used Webkit's Squirrelfish, I think the Palm Pre shipped with V8 before Android did!

Never heard of Stainless before. Thanks!

I've been using chromium for a while now and have been fairly happy with it (other than a bit of scrolling performance and some flash funnyness). Has anybody done a side by side comparison of Chromium and Google Chrome on the Mac?

The UI looks identical, functionally they look very similar, and performance seems about the same as well.

Thoughts?

Near as I can tell: all that changed was the version number from .27 to .30.

iStat Menus processor graph still goes nuts when scrolling compared to Safari. That said, Chromium/Chrome has been my default browser for about a month now.

Still no functioning bookmarks manager or bookmark sync. I was hoping they'd enable that in the beta release.

I'm pretty frustrated with this as well. I've been using Chromium for a while now, and I can't use this Beta because it doesn't share bookmarks, or allow me to import from Chromium, or even move/delete the existing bookmarks.

Guess I'll keep with the less stable nightlies for a while longer.

I like being able to move tabs between windows seamlessly with Chrome. Safari lets you detach a tab into a new window but that's about it. I don't think you can merge it with another window that already has open tabs or re-attach it. My biggest gripe, which is purely personal preference, is not having the progress bar integrated with the address bar. At least the status bar automatically disappears after a page loads. The feature that will keep me on Safari is bookmark syncing via MobileMe. It's really nice having it sync to my other Macs and iPhone.

You can move tabs between windows in Safari on OSX.

Is this new in Safari 4? I don't remember this ever working before.

The first thing I did was convert the address bar to use a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search so that it functions more like Firefox.

Here's how: Right click the address bar, choose "Edit Search Engines...". Click the + to add a new search engine. Choose whatever name and keyword you wish, but for URL use http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky. Make this your default search engine. Works tolerably well.

How can they call this a beta when there's NO BOOKMARK MANAGER?

I might not know what you exactly mean by a "bookmark manager", but the star to the left of the URL textbox and Ctrl+B give you bookmarks.

The Mac version doesn't have a bookmark manager. You can click the star, and it saves the bookmark (or removes the bookmark). But unlike the Windows version there isn't a dialog/window that shows all your bookmarks and lets you drag/drop/etc.

Ctrl+B (or Command+B on the Mac, I assume) opens up a bar at the top (or at least it does in the Linux version) and you can drag your bookmarks between the bar and the "other bookmarks" folder.

Command+Shift+B, actually.

Yes, but there is still no bookmark manager. Try to create (on OS X) a bookmarks folder in the bookmarks bar. Proceed to add two bookmarks into that folder. Now... How do you edit/delete/rearrange the bookmarks that reside in the folder? I can't figure it out.

Here's what I did (on OS 10.6). 1) Created two bookmark folders in the bookmark bar named "NewFolder", and "OtherFolder" (right click on bar->Add Folder) 2) Added two bookmarks to NewFolder (browse to site, click star, select NewFolder in Folder drop down list) 3) Moved bookmarks from one folder to the other (browse to bookmarked page, click the star, click Edit, change the folder drop down selection, close)

This doesn't allow you to move folders around, and it's annoying that you don't have a way to manage the bookmark of a page without browsing to that page. It's not the full "Bookmark Manager", but you can manage bookmarks.

Evidently you haven't used Chrome on Windows?

Bookmark Bar != Bookmark Manager. Right-click on the Bookmark Bar. See that grayed-out entry for Bookmark Manager? That's not grayed-out on Windows. It should open a tab containing an app that allows you to edit/rearrange your bookmarks.

I cannot even drag bookmarks between folders in the Bookmark Bar. And as for the Bookmark Menu, I can't do anything with that at all. Not even delete bookmarks in it.

Heh, I've been wondering that too. Not that I need it that much, but it'd be nice to maybe be able to delete a bookmark folder. A lot to ask, I know.

Still, bar none my favorite browser on the mac. Love the fact that the dev tools are the latest webkit version. I'm done with memory hogs that are safari and firefox (though I still use firebug every now and again).

Does anyone know whether this has auto-update?

Not sure if this is just me, but Google autoupdate is just broken for mac. It pops up even when the program is not running and the update only works if the current user is an admin. It does not prompt for admin password like all other updates do. And there was no way to not have autoupdate. That led me uninstall all Google software a while back.

I am not referring to the general google updater that comes with the google pack. I mean the silent autoupdate that chrome for windows has.

Yes, that's been working in the dev version for a while.

I really do not like google's policy on updating. It presupposes that any organization has a lot of bandwidth and doesn't mind updates going off at inconvenient times. Since one of the places I work at has a couple labs of Macs and does video classes on the same internet connection, I see a real annoying situation.

Chrome updates are pretty bandwidth-light: http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software...

Yeah, well Google Earth isn't. This is where Microsoft and Apple have a clue. Let sysadmins have a central internal update server that can be controlled.

I've recently switched from Ubuntu to a Mac (mainly just to learn wtf everyone says is so great), I'd been running Chromium there for ages, I'd prefer to use Chromium rather than give so much data to Google but I could find a package which will update like Chromium did on Ubuntu. Any suggestions?

Google's official Chrome builds update themselves automatically while they're running without needing to relaunch.

The Mac Developer community has standardized on Sparkle, where the app downloads an update feed from the developer's site and prompts for an automatic update/install/relaunch.

To get the Chromium on Ubuntu behavior of manually-initiated centralized automatic updates, you'd have to use a package manager and the only viable one is MacPorts, which is just not a good fit for desktop software.

This Beta doesn't have a bookmarks manager. Does that mean we have to wait until the next release to get it? That would be pretty bad to ship a browser with no bookmark manager.

Whats with the versioning of Chrome for Mac.

"About Google Chrome" says 4.0.249.30 and AFAIK this is the only "Beta" software with a major version as high as 4.

Version parity. It's done all the time when porting to a new platform. Why would you want identical software to have different version numbers on three different platforms.

OK. makes sense. But then how come Win Chrome is already at version 4.

In other words 4 as the major version seems high considering Chrome, for any platform, is fairly new. Compare that with FF which has been for much longer and is at 3.5.x

Are they tracking Webkit or any other version?

No, just trying to compete with IE8 in an enterprise environment. At the speed they're going, they'll catch up pretty soon :)

Everyone must be downloading it all at once. 22 KB/sec download speed on a T1 connection. I would expect better of Google.

Really? My download completed in about 20 seconds. T1 lines are highly reliable, provide guaranteed bandwidth, and low-latency, but are also very slow at only 1.544mbps (on par with low-end DSL).

I might just be a local network condition, though the rest of the internet is loading at its usual speed. My Chrome download is still chugging away....

Have you tried torrenting it?

Yea! File upload works now. Now I shouldn't need Camino any more.

Don't have my mac handy.. Does it have full screen support on OS X?

Yup, although the option is grey-ed out on my machine ATM, and I couldn't tell you why...

I've used it before, though

I have yet to find a browser with full screen support on OS X - which makes me think it's an OS X limitation.. So odd.. When you have a 13 inch macbook this problem becomes readily apparent.

Gray-ed out on mine too. Does anyone know why? This would definitely be nice to have.

This feels even faster than the developer betas. Excellent.

Gmaps and Gcal aren't rendered properly. Am I the only one?

Calendar looks great for me.

Let me know when it gets plugin support...

It has had plugin support (at least flash) for some time now.

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