I got sent a link earlier today via Twitter with the page where you can download all the builds up to the latest of Chromium for Mac.
Chromium is an open source web browser for Mac based upon Google’s original ‘Chrome‘ which was release for Windows only.
I have downloaded the latest Chromium build at the time of writing this post and have thought up a few points about the current status of the app.
Chromium running the Apple.com website.
After loading the app up for the first time I realised the speed of the app and loaded pretty much instantly. The first page is the same idea as the current Chrome for Windows, the sheet of most visited websites with small images showing a thumbnail of the web page. The top bar with the tabs for the web pages follows the same etiquette as the Windows version (and the latest Safari beta from Apple) and has them as the very top most bar to keep them out of the way of the browsing space and above the address bar.
The page loading times couldn’t really be defined within the small space of time of trying out the app. And I don’t think it’s fair to criticize the loading times so early on in its development stages.
One point that I could make out, was that some of the animations for creating a new tab were a bit.. odd. When creating a new tab usually it’s quickly added onto the queue of tabs at the top. However, when using Chromium for Mac I found that the tab was loaded underneath the first tab and then you could see the tab slide from beneath there to the new location. I’m sure little things like this will be sorted fine before it can even be called a ‘beta’ product.
The app is still very early on in development and needs A LOT of changing before I would consider it my default web browser. However, I think it’s safe to say that what has been done so far is pretty good!
The Good
- You’ll be pleased to hear it’s a fast loader!
- Themed with Mac OS X and doesn’t have a bright blue theme.
- When you drag a tab it actually moves the tab around the top bar rather than move the whole window (which was a large annoyance to me in the new Safari beta by Apple)
- Runs well and looks good!
The Bad
- It crashed within the first 2 minutes of playing around (no notification of a crash or anything, it just vanished and the dock show it wasn’t running anymore.
- Quite glitchy here and there – nothing major though despite the point above
- Animations on creating a new tab are bad and make it look slow when adding a large number of tabs
Overall
The app looks a great start and runs very fast. The theme is nice, simple and fits in with OS X Leopard. It’s free, open source and is coming along quite well.
