Google Chromium for Mac OS X First Impressions

Are you a Mac OS X user dying to get your dirty little hands on a working copy of Google Chrome for Mac because of all the hype surrounding the Windows version of the browser? No need to wait any longer as nightly test builds of Chromium are available to anyone interested in test driving the early developmental releases of the browser. The TechMiso Soup Chefs took Chromium for a spin and here’s what we found about this highly anticipated project.

In case you have been living under a rock, Chromium is the open-source version of the Google Chrome project. It is strictly designed for OS X and is currently in heavy development. Chromium is not in a state to be used as a primary browser, by any stretch of the imagination, even though it is functional.

If there is to be a single takeaway from our first impression then it has to be the speed. Chromium is blazingly fast. The initial window appeared almost immediately after that second mouse click clicked away, and pages load in almost no time. Even highly complex, Javascript-ridden sites likes Google Reader and Gmail loaded almost instantaneously. It is amazing to see a browser load pages like one would expect – quickly!

Sadly, Yahoo! Mail and other similar sites which sniff browser versions did not load, instead displaying a wonderful greeting about how the site is not supported on this version of this browser. So long as the site works in other WebKit-based browsers (ie. Safari) one would think it would display just fine in Chromium. Apparently that is not to be the case.

Dragging and dropping tabs all around the tabbar appears to function just fine. You can even drag a tab off the tabbar to create a new window with only that tab open. In reverse, you can drag a tab from one window to another windows tabbar. This has the effect of closing the original window and the tab being placed in the tabbar of the destination window. All very cool, functional features.

Outside of the blistering loading times, it is quite obvious the browser is not finished. The “home screen” of “most visited” sites does not look polished even though it does display screenshots and list the most trafficked sites. I get the impression this feature remains under construction and feel as if I should be wearing a hard hat when tinkering in this area.

The configuration dialog is quite scarce. Although Chrome on Windows does not have a substantial number of settings, it is apparent the preferences dialog is complete. This is not the case with Chromium. Many options on the “User Data” page are grayed out while the “Under The Hood” page exists with absolutely no options whatsoever.

Overall, it was a lot of fun to play with Chromium, especially because of how fast it is. Chromium is so fast that it feels as if it is faster than the Safari 4 beta even though it is too early to compare the two products. Chromium’s presentation is pleasant and I expect the browser, like wine, to get better with age. After all, this is merely a developmental release and not a publicly consumable beta. There is no comparison at this juncture.