Chrome Gets Deadline for Mac, Linux

From DailyTech: Mac and Linux users anxious to run Google’s Chrome browser now have a hard deadline for when that will be possible: the middle of 2009.

“That's what we've been hoping for,” said Chrome product manager Brian Rakowski, in an interview, describing both efforts as proceeding “in parallel” and “at the same level of progress.”

A crude “TestShell” version of the browser is already available on both platforms, but its functionality is minimal at best: the Chromium developer site describes it as a “single-process test harness” for browser development, allowing developers to better debug and test the browser’s page renderer before it is incorporated into Chrome’s famous but difficult-to-debug sandbox architecture.

According to the developer page, Chrome’s Mac and Linux renderer already passes 90% of the “all-important” WebKit layout tests, with outstanding problems in many cases related to text fields.

The weekend also brought news for Chrome’s Windows users: Google released an alpha build of Chrome 2.0 – less than a month after taking Chrome 1.0 out of beta and a few weeks over three months since its surprise release – and it includes a handful of new features, like autocomplete and user profiles, that bring it up to speed with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

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