Google targets Chrome for mid-year showdown with Safari

Mac users will get their first taste of a Google-developed alternative to incumbent browsers such as Safari and Firefox when the search giant releases Chrome for Mac sometime during the "first half" of this year.

A recent report fromÂ CNET News.comÂ includes a conversation with Chrome product manager Brian Radowski, who provided an update on the development of Chrome for Mac and Linux, which will soon join the already-operational Windows version.

"[The first half of 2009] is what we're hoping for," he said.Â "Those two efforts proceeding in parallel.Â They're at the same level of progress."

More specifically, the report notes that the Mac version has reached the "test shell" stage, able to display websites but not much else.

"[It can] render most Web pages pretty well," Rakowski said.Â "But in terms of the user experience, it's very basic.Â We have not spent any time building out features.Â We're still iterating on making it stable and getting the architecture right."

Also coming soon to Chrome, which is based on Apple's WebKit open source rendering engine, is a framework to handle downloadable plug-in extensions, a feature long available in Mozilla's Firefox.

Readers interested in keeping tabs on the development of Chrome for Mac can head over to the project's detailed status page, or compile and run the latest version of the TestShell project, which lacks a traditional Mac interface.

Users can subscribe to three different Chrome channels: stable, beta, and developer preview.Â Google expects to update the stable channel once per quarter.

For more onÂ Chrome, please see earlier coverage of the Google browser initiative.

52 Comments

bdkennedy1 1458 comments · 20 Years

About 15 years ago

If it doesn't get Keychain support, I'm not interested.

clive at five 756 comments · 18 Years

Chrome = zzzzzzzzzz

richl 2211 comments · 17 Years

I swapped over to Chrome on my Windows machine when I realized that Firefox 3 was a buggy piece of crap. Chrome is nothing spectacular but it gets the basics right.

vandil 187 comments · 15 Years

I wasn't that impressed with Chrome on Windows.

I'm more interested in Safari 4. From what I hear from developers, it's ridiculously fast, and its Java engine is much faster than Chrome's.

virgil-tb2 1416 comments · 16 Years

I know a lot of folks like Chrome but aren't you going a little bit overboard with the hype here? Chrome and Safari are going to have a "showdown?"

Chrome is basically a 0.9 technology demo at this stage and only available for Windows. Making the same thing available for Mac months from now is not exactly a browser "showdown" or "shootout" or any of those other tired cowboy metaphors that tech journalists have been dragging out for the last ten years or so.

Safari is a mature, full-featured browser, Chrome is (so far) a one trick (demo) pony. To compare them as this article does and suppose that they are competition for each other is a bit of a joke IMO. It's a virtual certainty for instance that the next shipping version of Safari, which is imminent by all accounts, will be faster, more stable and far more popular than any Chrome browser is likely to be any time soon.

The only thing Chrome has going for it at the moment is the tabs running in their own memory space gimmick which is easily duplicated and could easily appear in "rival" browsers before the Mac version of Chrome is even out the door.