FOSSwire

The Chromium blog (Chromium being Google’s name for the open source project behind their Chrome browser) reports that developer builds of Google Chrome are now available for both Mac OS X and Linux.

Google Chrome has always been promised to be a cross-platform browser, right from when it was originally launched in September last year.

This is just the beginning—Google Chrome is far from done. We’re releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

However, up until today there have been no officially Google-branded Chrome releases for anything other than Windows.

Google are making it quite clear that Chrome is far from finished on the Mac and Linux platforms, strongly advising you not to use the browser unless you’re a developer, or love living on the bleeding edge.

It does seem to work pretty well actually as a browser, however. I’ve only played with it for a short time, but it seems to feel a lot snappier than Firefox on this machine. While the missing bits of functionality, such as plugins, does mean that it can’t really yet (and probably shouldn’t) become your primary browser, Chrome for Linux looks really promising as an excellent WebKit-based browser for Linux and a strong competitor for Firefox.

Right now, there are only .deb packages for x86 and x86–64 (AMD64) available, so you’ll need a Debian or Ubuntu system to run the test build. On my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 system it runs really well.

To download this test release, go across to the Chromium Dev Channel and scroll down to the ‘For Linux’ heading. Also do take note that the installation package will add Google’s repository to your system to automatically keep Chrome up to date.

What do you think of Google Chrome? Do we need another browser on Linux? Is Google Chrome set to be the best WebKit browser on Linux, the best browser in its own right or simply unnecessary or undesired on the platform? Have your say both in the comments and in the forums.

The web isn’t just about static web sites anymore. Web applications, like Google Docs, Gmail and many others, are extremely popular.

But confining an important application inside a browser window means that web applications feel like second-class citizens and can get lost amongst the browsing that you are doing.

Site-specific browsers (SSBs) are designed to solve this problem. The idea, as the name suggests, is to create a browser specifically for each of these applications. The web app then exists in its own window and has its own space on your desktop.

Prism is Mozilla’s site-specific browser offering. Prism is based on Firefox, sharing the Gecko rendering engine, meaning it should have excellent compatibility with even the fussiest of applications. Like Firefox, it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X natively.

There is both a Firefox extension and a standalone application available which allow you to create SSBs. With the standalone application, you simply launch it, enter the URL of the application you want to use (for example, Google Calendar would be https://www.google.com/calendar), set a few other settings and click OK.

And that’s it! You now have a site-specific browser for that app. It can exist alongside every other desktop application on your machine and feel like a real application, rather than just something that has to hide away in a browser tab.

The Firefox extension works in a very similar way, but makes it even easier. It adds an option to Tools > Convert Website to Application, so you can simply browse to the website in question, issue that command and create an SSB.

If you like working with applications in the cloud, but prefer to not have to live entirely in your web browser, site-specific browsers and Prism might be interesting to play with.

There are a couple of others (Konqueror, Epiphany), but the primary open source browser that you're likely to be using on Linux is Firefox.

Now don't get me wrong, Firefox is great for a lot of things. It is endlessly customisable and has ubiquitous support from website developers. It does have disadvantages too, however, including not exactly being the quickest beast out there.

WebKit is an open source browser engine (the code that does the heavy lifting inside your browser) that Apple made for its Safari browser. It is derived from the KHTML engine that was developed for Konqueror, but was reworked quite a bit by Apple and now various other third parties.

A lot of people prefer WebKit to Gecko (the engine behind Firefox). It's clean, fast and has a lot of different companies and organisations behind it. It's not just limited to Safari - it's in lots of mobile phone browsers, powers Google's Chrome browser and lots more.

Midori is a lightweight web browser for Linux built on top of WebKit. It doesn't have a load of features right now, but if you're looking for something that's quick, but has good compatibility with websites that don't play well in other alternative browsers like Konqueror, it's worth a look.

Despite some of its limitations, Midori does have built in support for User Scripts (which you might know as Greasemonkey), a bookmark manager, a customisable search box and a few other features.

It won't be suitable for everyone, however, or perhaps for all your browsing needs. I didn't find a way to run Flash inside, which might put some people off. Despite that, if you want a browser that's very quick and very light, even if you don't use it full-time, seriously take a look at Midori.

If you're running the latest Ubuntu version, Intrepid Ibex, you'll be able to install Midori by searching in Add/Remove Programs. Alternatively, still trying searching in your package manager, or you can get the source code.

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