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.

In an announcement email this morning, the developers of the Epiphany web browser have announced that the next release will be based off of WebKit, and only WebKit.

We are a small team, with only one maintainer and a hand-full of
regular contributors. Maintaining the abstraction layer, and the Gecko
back-end require lot of effort and time. Much time alone is spent on
keeping up with Gecko API changes, and we have not had much
contributions to the Gecko back-end in a long time. [...]

This single back-end will be * WebKit *.

This is the first time users will be able to experience WebKit on a GNOME desktop by default. Currently, to use WebKit, users need to download and install Konqueror from the KDE desktop or manually compile WebKit into epiphany.

The WebKit-enabled epiphany will make it into GNOME 2.24 this fall, or GNOME 2.26 next year depending on the development speed.

Mozilla have announced the release of Firefox 3.0 Beta 1, the ninth major development release of the Firefox 3.0 product.

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the ninth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

New features cited in Firefox 3.0 include various security enhancements, a new download manager supporting resumable downloads, tagging bookmarks for better organisation, a 'Smart Places' folder for accessing recent and favourite sites and many bug fixes over the 2.0 series.

Of course, Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 is exactly that - beta-quality software, so it may crash, break things and eat your data. I recommend everyone who does give this a try to back up their profile folder before installing.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and can be downloaded from this page.