Many moons after promising eventual support for the *NIX-flavored amongst us, Google has announced the immediate availability of browser extensions and betas for both Mac OS X and Linux.
“There was nothing more excruciating for me as a kid than seeing the presents pile up under the Christmas tree but knowing that I couldn’t open them until Christmas morning,” said Chrome Product Manager Brian Rakowski. “On the Google Chrome team, we’ve had the same feeling as we’ve been working to get betas ready for Mac, Linux and extensions. It’s been a long time coming, but today we can check the top three items off our users’ wish lists.”
On the Mac OS front, Rakowski adopted an apologetic tone for the longer than expected development time, but promised that the experience would be in line with what Mac users expect from their applications.
“We’ve been working hard to deliver a first-class browser for the Mac — it took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it! We wanted Google Chrome to feel at home on the Mac, so we’ve focused on uniting our clean, simple design with subtle animations and effects to create a snappy and satisfying browsing experience on OS X,” Rakowski wrote.
On the Linux front, Chrome has been tailored for tight integration with native GTK themes, updates that are managed by the system package manager, and other features native to the Linux experience. Google has also received aid from the open source community in the form of code contributions to Chromium, the open source browser project on which Chrome is based, many of which have been carried forward into the official Chrome beta.
“Bringing Google Chrome to Linux wasn’t just a straight port — it was a labor of love. Google Chrome works well with both Gnome and KDE, and is updated via the normal system package manager. It has also been developed as a true open source project, using public mailing lists, IRC channels, bug tracker, code repository, and continuous build and test farm — following in large part the trail blazed by Mozilla,” wrote Dan Kegel and Evan Martin, Software Engineers for the Chromium project. “In short, we really love Google Chrome for Linux, and we think you will, too.”
Extensions
Coinciding with Chrome’s new multi-platform capabilities, Google has finally begun offering support for extensions that add to Chrome’s functionality without compromising the browser’s speed or stability.
“When we first launched Google Chrome in September 2008, we knew that we wanted to make it easy for you to customize the browser with extensions. We also wanted to make extensions easy to create and maintain, while preserving Google Chrome’s speed and stability,” Rakowski said.
“Extensions on Google Chrome accomplishes all these goals: they are as easy to create as web pages, easy to install, and each extension runs in its own process to avoid crashing or significantly slowing down the browser.”
Users interested in trying any of the new features can get their download on at the appropriate link below:
Google Chrome for Mac (Beta)
Google Chrome for Linux (Beta)
Chrome Extension Gallery
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