Google Chrome browser beta arrives on Mac

The Google Chrome web browser has gotten a lot of attention this past year and unfortunately, despite it being a World Wide Web application, it only ran on Windows.

Google promised recently to have a Mac beta out in December, and they did indeed. I tried it out on my Macintosh.

I found Chrome very fast, like the latest Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5. However, there were some glitches. At one point, I had to abort it when it hung up on me after complaining about a script.

There were two disappointments for me in the area of short-comings.

1. Despite the fact I have the latest version of Java and operating system on my Mac, Chrome is not detecting Java or running any Java applets. The wrongness of this is accentuated by the fat that Chrome does detect and display Flash content.
2. No extensions for the Mac yet. This seems strange. To Firefox, extensions are cross platform and it does not matter what OS you are running. The OS dependent code is supposed to go into plugins.

Spotting what plugins your browser has installed can be done with Mozilla's plugincheck web page. It is not fully functional unless you are using Firefox but it will tell you which ones your browser has.

Checking what version of Java you have, and figuring out if it is up to date requires a quick trip to the Java Tester Version web page. Very handy. Well, if your browser is running Java applets in the first place, that is!

Something else that is not working is Services. They are a Mac-specific feature that can perform all manner of operations on selected text in your Mac applications. Typically, the Services menu is supported by Cocoa applications, which are the majority on the Macintosh these days.

Chrome does not seem to be supporting the features that are standard for Cocoa-based Mac applications. It lacks support for Dictionary word-lookup and other features that are in Safari too.

Chrome does support themes and comes with what seems like about fifty or so of them. The quality of the artwork is good but Chrome provides a much smaller canvas for theme art than Firefox does.

The themes just get to paint their design on a narrow strip going across the top of the web browser window. Still, it is nice to offer some form of visual customization so the feature is very much appreciated.

Chrome for the Mac does support Saving bookmarks. However, it lacks a bookmark organizer or manager window like the ones that have been standard in Firefox and Safari pretty much forever. That is another disappointment.

Google seems to have created a fast, modern web browser for the Mac which is compatible to Safari in those regards. It should be very useful in its current form to web developers who want to make sure Chrome will support their content.

I liked that on my installation, at least - the amazing WebKit Developer Tools are enabled. They let you inspect the current selection on the web page in a popup window The window shows the source code of the page. It is wonderful. Despite being a diagnostic/analysis tool - the text and the window pane itself are beautiful. They are available in Safari too, if you install the WebKit application and enable them.

This beta version 4.0.249.43 will probably will not replace Safari 4 for any regular web users, however.

Google is aware of the short-comings and has said they will be adding support for more Mac and Chrome features in an upcoming version of the software.

What Google has done in so short a time period is indeed remarkable. Apparently, these days it is much faster to create a brand new web browser with cross platform web components, that to upgrade a really old platform-specific browser.

There are pretty sound software engineering reasons for this. Google has a solid reputation for software engineering feats. It looks like they are pulling of another of them. It is premature to make it your default web browser on the Mac, though - for now.