Back in September, Google launched its Chrome browser. With advanced features like website task managers, visual histories, individual browser memory management, and even the ability to re-open tabs that you accidentally closed, Chrome promised to reshape the browser, offering new abilities and capabilities that went beyond the status quo. Windows users got immediate access to those capabilities, but Google has yet to release Chrome for OS X and Linux.

That's not to say that Google been hiding its development progress behind closed doors. Chromium is the open source project that, like its metallic namesake, is used to make Chrome. The Chromium source code repository has remained available and updated since the September 2008 Chrome introduction. Since there hasn't been any really big news or progress updates, Chromium for OS X and Linux has basically dropped off the radar for the past few months. But that doesn't mean that progress isn't being made. We recently checked out the latest iteration of the Chromium source, and we talked to some of the Googlers behind the project to get a sense of where the Chrome OS X port is, and when Mac users might have something functional in our hands.

A Cocoa interface goes live

Just before Valentine's Day, Google's Mike Pinkerton, a Staff Software Engineer, posted several Mac Chrome screenshots on the mozillaZine blog. Immediately, the Mac-loving portion of the web universe perked up and started taking notice. Chrome? For OS X? Everyone wanted to know how close Google was to a initial OS X release. The answer then was "Not very."

Pinkerton's post made it quite clear that things remained preliminary on the OS X front. "Now mind you, clicking doesn't work, and the renderers crash like nobody's business," he wrote while gushing about finally getting a Cocoa UI operational, "but the other great thing is that the user interface stays running even if they do." When web denizens complained about the primitive state of the release, Pinkerton responded, "That's exactly why we haven't released it, but it's absolutely moving forward."

As you can see from this video walk-through of the release at that time, there was not much to look at:

February Chromium Walk-through

That was then, and this is now. A month later, Chromium has made huge leaps forward. You can load web pages, follow links, and work (somewhat) with tabs. There's no support for plug-ins, and the browser remains fairly unstable, leaving as it did a wake of hung processes which I could follow using Leopard's Activity Monitor. As this second video shows, many features remain unimplemented, and basic features (like closing windows) may fail.

March Chromium Walk-through

Listing image by OZL/Deviant Art