Chromium with git

Hey! There’s avalaible a article describing howto use git with Chrome’s sources! Check out now!

Google Chrome, comment on a project

When I heard about Google Chrome for the first time I got really excited, I read the comic (even thought it was loading really slow) and googled a lot for informations about that . It was before the webcast so I didn’t find much, but read enough comments to ask myself few questions, let me point them:

• which license would be used?
• how does Google solves problem of portability between different operating systems?, especially:
  • Sandbox
  • processes management, which is used to provide new fantastic tabs (must there be any?)
  • problems concerning integrating Chrome with Linux’s desktops
• which development mode Google would pick, cathedral or bazaar?
  • and how they’re gonna organize whole development process

Now there’s time for some answers!

Google is generous!

I must be honest, I was expecting that Google will pubic Chrome’s code on a copyleft license, such as GPL. But (fortunately IMHO) they picked a BSD license, it’s extremely generous! Please remember that now everyone can take piece of this browser’s code and close it (publish on a proprietary license), even Microsoft in Internet Explorer! This is possible because BSD license differ a lot from GPL and allows to do with the code almost everything and doesn’t force publishing derivative works on same or free (as freedom) license.

Considering that also WebKit and V8 are published under BSD license, I think that Google is reminding us that software published on GPL don’t make world place as good as it could be. In advertisements (or maybe in webcast, I don’t remember) Google encourage developers of other internet browser to use Chrome’s code, we know that Firefox guys are working on new Java Script engine (which is planned to be included in Firefox 3.1) and IE or Opera need a JS boost too – now they can just use V8! And world is a better place! (not to mention that it is a place with much more faster JS!)

You can download whole source code, read documentation, report bugs or submit patches via Chromium website, check it now:)

No portability now:(

Unfortunately Chrome’s beta was released only for Windows (even not for all of them, just for XP with SP2 and Vista!), no Linux nor Mac, sorry:( At least we know that Google works on them, in available code and documentation we can find that Chrome runs on new GUI framework – ChromeViews and guess that it would be ported on Mac and Linux. Before releasing beta many people was thinking that Google would choose a QT4 as a framework – it works on many systems and applications using it are easy portable, maybe them would pick it just for Linux and/or OS X? AFAIR whole source code for Linux is not available yet and we have to wait.

Chromium.org

I’ve mentioned earlier Chromium.org – the Chrome’s development centre where we can find build instructions, links to sources and documentation (pretty big as for so young project). Also Google has run few mailing lists about Chrome and a bugtracker. I read lists but don’t find them interesting, community is young and mostly complains about bugs and missing features (usually many times for one), but I’ll wait, I hope more interesting discussion about e.g. technical details would appear soon.

Google shares the code via subversion repository , but I haven’t managed it to work properly yet. However I find using svn very annoying, I’ve got used to DVCS like managing projects. Of course I understand that Chrome’s sources is over 400MB and history of whole project is probably bigger than few gigabytes, but the repository could be split into some logical parts, at least users would end with big history of project on their machines (until gclient, google script which helps us to manage repository, solves this somehow, I haven’t read it’s code yet). Maybe this would be improved in future.

We also don’t know much about development process, but I guess Google wouldn’t suprise us and will cooperate with community. But even if they prefer to keep whole process in secret and just public next revisions in repo, we still could build our own browser MyChrome. Isn’t it great?