CodeWeavers brings Chromium to OS X and Linux

Filed under: Macintosh, Linux, Google, Browsers

CodeWeavers brings Chromium to OS X and Linux

by Christina Warren Sep 16th 2008

CodeWeavers, the main corporate sponsor of the Wine Project, have released a port of Google Chrome, known as CrossOver Chromium, for Linux and OS X systems. Although users running virtual instances of Windows in either OS X or Linux have been able to run since day one, CrossOver Chromium is unique because it does not require a Windows installation to run.

Although CrossOver Chromium works, please note that this is not intended to be used as a default browser. CodeWeaver's website even states that this is just "a proof of concept, for fun, and to showcase what Wine can do." This is important because at least on my MacBook running Leopard 10.5.5, CrossOver Chromium was extremely slow. Some images were also squished and text display was slightly off, probably a result of trying to compensate for Microsoft's ClearType and Apple's Quartz display engines.

To be honest, performance was significantly snappier running Chrome in a virtual machine in VMWare Fusion or Parallels than it was within CrossOver Chromium. But I suppose that's not really the point; the point is that the magic of Wine has made Google's latest browser accessible on Intel machines not running Windows. And that's pretty cool.

CrossOver Chromium is free. You can download it for OS X (10.4 or higher, Intel processor required) or in variants for Ubuntu and Debian (32-bit and 64-bit available), RedHat, Mandriva, Suse and other Linux distros here.

Tags: chromium, codeweavers, crossover, google-chrome, wine

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jash Sayani said 10:48AM on 9-16-2008

Just tried it on my Mac. The startup is too slow. Safari is good for now. But hope to see a native Mac version soon.....

kojo87 said 4:18PM on 9-16-2008

got it running on Ubuntu Eee 8.04.1 on my Eee 701. start up is slow on the Linux version too compared to Firefox 3. waiting for the native version as well...

Idle said 7:19PM on 9-17-2008

This is a horrible excuse for a release. Not even worth the time. I may as well install BootCamp and just run that.

Andrew Roazen said 3:25PM on 10-06-2008

This also allows you to run most .EXE files as well once it's installed, but I can see why Codeweavers wouldn't want to mention this.

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