Application-portability software developer CodeWeavers has ported a version of Chromium to Mac OS X and Linux, and made the web browser available for free.
The company, which specialises in making software work on other operating systems, has built a reputation for allowing applications such as Microsoft Office to run on Linux.
In a blog post, CodeWeavers' chief executive, Jeremy White, said the company had published freely available Mac and Linux browsers based on Chromium, the open-source code that underpins Google's Chrome. Google has said it is working on Mac and Linux versions of Chrome, but it has not published them yet.
White said CodeWeavers had been looking for a way to show off the maturity of the Wine emulation software that the company uses.
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"On Thursday, 4 September, I called a company fire drill," he wrote. "I said I wanted to ship ported versions of Chromium for Mac and Linux, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible. By Friday, we had a first working build." After ironing out a number of major bugs, the software was ready after a week.
"Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be," White wrote. "In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux."
Talkback
Congatulations to Codeweavers for a great coup. However, unless I'm mistaken, Flash and other video does not run in an otherwise rather clever program and, under Ubuntu anyway, there are some issues with fonts and text.
Nevertheless, I'll shall carry on using it until the Linux version of Chromium is released. One advantage to Codeweavers' version of Chromium is that it comes with its own uninstaller.
Hopefully this will raise the profile of Codeweavers Crossover and Wine for running programmes designed for Windows on Linux and aid the takeup of Linux on the desktop and laptop.