Chromium Alpha for Linux

Chromium has been steadily improving. The latest (May 29-30) warning / disclaimer page in 3.0.183.0 (0) looks better than ever! :-)

Chromium Alpha

This is an alpha build of Chromium on Linux. The following, significant chunks of functionality are known to be missing:

• Plugins, inc Flash (so no YouTube, Hulu etc)
• Printing
• Complex text
• Complex tab dragging
• Gears support

Other parts of the browser are notably incomplete, poorly tuned and broken. User beware!

‘Chromium’ vs ‘Google Chrome’

Chromium is an open source browser project. Google Chrome is a browser from Google, based on the Chromium project.
This is a build of Chromium. No versions of Google Chrome for Linux will exist until Google makes an official release.

Don't file bugs without doing the work

Every minute spent triaging and de-duplicating bugs is a minute spent not fixing them. If you have a good bug report (e.g. includes a stack trace or a reduced test case), first verify it exists in the latest build, thenverify it hasn't been filed already, then file your bug using the Linux-specific template.

How to help

Chromium is an open source project, and you are welcome to help out. We have documentation for developers as well as mailing lists and an IRC channel.

Chromium for Linux advancing rapidly

I'm writing this blog post using today's build of the Chromium web browser for Linux. For those who don't know, it's the Linux version of the Google Chrome browsers.

The progress over the last few weeks have been good. On my 64-bit AMD Opteron-based system running Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit desktop, the first build I got running could do little more than display the developer pages at the Chromium web site. Any other site I tried caused it to crash.

Chromium can now display most sites correctly and I can open a new tab by clicking on the "+" sign. It's still early days though as I just crashed Chromium trying to cut / paste a few words in this post. It also does nothing with embedded flash objects and many of the menu items like, "Options" and "About Chromium", are mere stubs.

While these development versions of Chromium require SSE2 to be implemented on a CPU in order to run, a commenter to my blog post on that topic says SSE2 won't be required in the release version later on, so they should run on anything at that point.

Here is how it looked on my PC today. Click on the image for the full size. 

Chromium browser for Linux requires IA-32 + SSE2

Following the bug tracking for the Linux version of Google's Chrome browser, "Chromium" , it turns out Chromium requires a CPU supporting the SSE2 extensions to IA-32.

Oh.

I've been trying the daily updates of the Chromium browser for linux with no success. It crashes instantly on startup. The output says something isn't implemented. It appears that it isn't the browser code that isn't implementing, it's my PC(s).

I have several AMD athlon XP systems and none of them qualify for Chromium. There also doesn't appear to be any to extend the CPU function in software.

The list (Wikipaedia) of supported CPUs is:

• AMD K8-based CPUs (Athlon 64, Sempron 64, Turion 64, etc)
• AMD Phenom CPUs
• Intel NetBurst-based CPUs (Pentium 4, Xeon, Celeron, Celeron D, etc)
• Intel Pentium M and Celeron M
• Intel Core-based CPUs (Core Duo, Core Solo, etc)
• Intel Core 2-based CPUs (Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, etc)
• Intel Atom
• Transmeta Efficeon
• VIA C7
• VIA Nano

These don't. They're too old. (Wikipaedia)

• AMD CPUs prior to Athlon 64, including all Socket A-based CPUs
• Intel CPUs prior to Pentium 4
• Via C3
• Transmeta Crusoe

Looks like Intel CPUs are well supported, going back several years, but AMD's very popular Athlon series missed out on SSE2.

Ooooh......all right then. Guess I'll stop downloading those Chromium packages every morning, though maybe it will work on my AMD Opteron 64-bit system via IA32 support....and SSE2.


UPDATE 3/4/09: Installed the Chromium browser on my AMD Opteron system. The first screen warns you that it is pre-alpha and full of holes and asks you not to talk too much about it as it is very much incomplete. As I understand it, "chrome" (used by Safari and Google Chrome) has no Linux equivalent and 'Chromium' is the project trying to create that. So it isn't just about the browser. It's about the platform of APIs the browser needs to exist. Non-trivial! So if you get a window up at all and create additional tabs (see screen shot of today's build) is something of a triumph, even it crashes before you're actually able to access any web sites. It does seem to work well with the Chromium developer pages if you click on the links on the warning page. There is promise here.