Developer Builds of Google Chrome Now Available for OS X

Google’s Chrome browser for OSX is now available. The news comes several weeks after the release of the initial OSX builds of Chromium, the open source project behind Chrome. However, users eager to download the builds should be forewarned that they are buggy, unstable and feature-incomplete. The new builds incapacitate the ability to view YouTube videos, change privacy settings, set a default search engine, or even print web pages.

While the release hints that Google is making progress on the OS X version of Chrome, it appears that Google has quite a few hurdles to jump before it officially releases its browser for Mac users. Apple fans have been looking forward to the public launch of Chrome for OS X and many have expressed frustration with the length of time it is taking to complete development. Google co-found Sergey Brin even went as far as to call the lack of a Mac version “embarrassing.”

But, as Google developer Mike Pinkerton adds, who has been working on the OS X version of Chrome, the frustration of developing the software is much more difficult than many think. “We're lucky in Chromium that we can leverage a lot of shared code from the windows side,” says Pinkerton. “But, we do have to write a bunch of UI code (unless you want the UI to just look and behave exactly like windows...I didn't think so). We're also not just embedding WebKit and dragging in a couple buttons and a text field. The team has made significant changes to how WebCore works (resource loading, sandboxing, multi-process, etc) and those take time to get right on other platforms.”