Posts Tagged ‘google’

Why is Chrome OS going to be successful?

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

People reading this post who know a little about Chrome might point at the title of this post and consider it a typo – it should read why isn’t Chrome OS going to be successful? I wish that this were true.

Chrome OS is Google’s attempt at an operating system, and can be described as a browser in a box. It looks identical to its namesake and contains little more. The interface is simply a browser window with tabs for separate “applications”, it’s applications are naught more than websites (or in true 2.0 lingo – “web apps”), and just to ensure that the user is limited as to what they can do, the filesystem is read-only. In other words – the Chrome is good for one thing and one thing only: surfing the web.

Why then, with statistics showing internet usage globally leveling out and laptops being introduced to more and more children, would a generation understanding the capabilities of machines be content with such a handicap as Chrome OS? It’s known that “simple sells”, but too simple?

The answer lies with the market that Chrome OS is truly aiming at: SMEs. With the Go Google initiative the next step is to provide the hardware that supports it. Most uses of a laptop in corporate environments are limited to document processing and web research. Given that they choose the specs of the computers, Chrome OS is able to provide this at a bargain. So when management has to give Joe down at accounting a laptop for his work, he doesn’t need to bother about licensing, cost, endless software debugging and maintenance – but simply throw (yep, SSDs!) a Chrome laptop at him. Data redundancy, “software” upgrades and whatever else the cloud brings is an added bonus. Yeah – it’s not a hard choice. It’s cheaper, gets the job done, and it truly is a “work” laptop.

The objective isn’t to throw it into the market as a whole or start from the housewives and grandparents with such a simple laptop but instead the objective is to turn it into an industry standard – an industry standard that works best when companies have Gone Google. Most SMEs don’t care about the drawbacks of using a cloud-based system either – this makes the costs of moving to such a standard minimal. Both sides win. This approach into the market is only one that Google can employ – and is the reason why Chrome OS can break in successfully compared to others like Moblin, even though Moblin has the same simplicity and speed.

Then of course some of the less computer literate (which is the majority of the world, unless you live under a rock) don’t mind using it either. Chrome OS makes the netbook what it should be – a netbook, and schwoop we have another player in the market. In a nutshell. The trick behind this is the frictional costs. The frictional costs of moving to such a system is minimal. I say this as a relative term in comparison to the costs of switching from a cloud-based system.

The conclusion is not that Chrome OS is going to take over the OS market. No – especially in large firms the costs of moving to such a system is unquestionable. However this approach will definitely break the barrier between lightweight computer users and Linux-based OSes. Whether or not this is a good thing for existing Linux platforms is still unknown and free for speculation.

Of course, in the future when our needs for computers far exceed this, Chrome OS is definitely not the choice for that generation – but then again, Google has plenty of time to work towards that!

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Google Wave Review

Monday, October 26th, 2009

I have a Google Wave account. I’ve had it for a couple weeks now and have had time to familiarise myself with it enough to write a review.

In a nutshell, Google Wave is a pimped combination of email, instant messaging, and live document collaboration. It tries to combine these three functions into an interface that is easily accessible on the web. I think it’s best to split my review into these respective parts.

First I will talk about its function as email. If there’s something I’m really against, it’s unnecessary function duplication. I would like to stress my use of the word “unnecessary” here, because function duplication as an innovation strategy is actually incredibly good. Google wave is the perfect example of “unnecessary” function duplication for its use as email. It provides no extra benefit at the moment. It is simply what GMail is except inside a smaller window and formatted like a chatlog. But is it so bad? Now there are still a very limited number of bots you can use (small extensions that allow you to insert interactive “widgets” or manipulate the conversation in some way) but as time passes, I predict the number of bots will increase, and thus really make Google Wave’s use in email very, very different. One example is the “yes, no” widget, which allows anybody in the conversation to place themselves in the “yes”, “no” or “maybe” category – useful when organising an event.

Am I willing as a customer to give up my email for Wave? No. In the future? Maybe.

Instant messaging – it’s absolutely terrible. I’ve seen the Windows Live Messenger program do better. Inconvenient, clunky, extremely distracting (real time typing!), and gets confusing real fast. With shortcuts it’s barely manageable, but without, it’s a lost cause. Once you get more than 10 people in a single conversation (even with 5 people it’s absolutely terrible) you’d wish IRC were more mainstream.

Live document collaboration – admittedly I haven’t tested this as extensively as the previous ones but personally I wouldn’t go near Wave’s “live collaboration” with a 10 foot pole. Allow me to use an analogy here – let’s say you were a designer. A digital graphics designer. I can guarantee you that anybody doing this as a profession will not touch the computer unless they have a superbly clear idea of what they want in their head. Even if this were the case, I can again guarantee that discussions with other designers about their ideas in any collaborative environment or even with themselves would be done with their hands, a writing utensil and something to make marks on. Like “paper and pencil”, you know? It’s this process that Google is trying to digitize. Admittedly sometimes technology helps – but for things like these nothing beats face to face, or at least a good conversation over the phone.

Ok – but what about the application itself? It’s quite stable on my Firefox 3.5.something on Gentoo amd64. QtWebkit doesn’t display it properly (KHTML? Not a chance). It’s speedy up until I try to use the playback feature on a conversation, and I’ve been in a Wave with over 100 people with … well, yes, a lot of lag, but it displays and still can be used if you’re a very patient person. Google Wave seems to be crossing the uncanny valley in a way I haven’t seen before – there is a form of “window management”, including docking, minimising, maximising and restoring. There are very many desktop-like effects, such as their interesting implementation of a scrollbar (think touchscreen device) – and many toolbars littered here and there, but overall it puts me off more than attracts.

However an important point to notice is that Google Wave is still not much more than a poorly implemented clone of what the desktop world has refined over the years. The web was designed as a standardised freeform canvas to present information, which is why websites are not desktop applications and desktop applications are websites. Scrollbars? Drag and drop? Right click? I’m sorry – when was the last time you used a proper application? Admittedly Google Wave is composed of three main areas as introduced through their loooooong video – one of them is to do with an API. This obviously means that there’s nothing preventing a future implementation of a Wave Client, but until then, Google Wave shall continue to receive my polite disgust.

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Planning to surf the Wave?

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Any self-respecting online crawler would know that Google Wave has started their private invitation-only beta. No, I don’t (yet) have an invitation. This does remind me of way back when GMail went through this phase. I obviously secured myself an invite early on (where early is relative) and switched over from Microsoft’s Hotmail to turn GMail into my mail provider and client of choice. However for quite a while now I’ve switched over from GMail and have been slowly erasing my Google identity. With this switch I have gained both flexibility, control, and more importantly – insight into my workflow.

The question I’ve been asking myself is: will I use Google Wave? Initially, I would say “sure why not? It’s revolutionary” – but truth be told, I’ve overestimated the hype.

Wave is a pimped web application. The question is not whether the web was built for this technology, because advances like this never are. The question is neither if I’d enjoy integrating Wave’s API into my blog and related websites. The question is if I can realistically see myself using Wave in my workflow?

Wave is a way to communicate and collaborate. At the moment I do all my communication through my blog, instant messaging, and my phone. I collaborate through version control, mailing lists, and Google Docs. Wave will not replace any single one of those, except perhaps mailing lists. Personally, and I’m sure this applies to others too, Wave is not something I will use to replace another in my workflow – instead it will add a completely new, unrelated workflow.

But what is this workflow? I see it in document collaboration for businesses. But honestly, I don’t see it in much else. I don’t see it in social networking (if I even used it). I don’t see it replacing any form of instant messaging. And I especially don’t see it invading the web with its API. The web is changing, yes, and changing fast. A website is a blank canvas that the user will accept anything and everything they see on it. This is very different from desktop applications – where a single out of place UI widget will provoke suspicion from the user. However despite the unlimited number of things you can do to a webpage – you simply can’t bond two of them together. You can’t make the user feel like its an integrated environment. Heck, sometimes it’s hard to make a single website look integrated. This is what I believe is the biggest setback, and the biggest weakness of what Wave is trying to achieve. This isn’t said from a selfish web-developer point of view, it’s coming from a person who uses the web just as much as the desktop.

What do you see Wave in? Will you surf the Wave?

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Chrome in the Clouds: The Google OS

Friday, July 10th, 2009

If you read my initial post about Google Chrome (the OS, not the Brow- wait a minute, is there even a clear distinction anymore?) you would have realised that I didn’t really give opinions on what I felt about it but instead  how I visualised it to be. I believe in designating some mull-over time before making a judgement. (hypocritically speaking, I did not do that when constructing my conspiracy theory when Google Wave came out)

Now is the time to see what exactly is going on.

My feelings in a nutshell

  • Would I buy such a product? If it were cheap (100 dollars or so), yes.
  • I feel Google is harming open-source.
  • Cloud computing is very important to me for accessibility and synchronisation.
  • We cannot fight, and should not fight.

The story behind it

The first point is easy to justify and I do believe this is very agreeable. This is an area of the markt people have always looked towards with an expectation of a “trustworthy” brand, and Google has just provided that to them. People will buy for this OS.

To a company, Google is probably executing its marketing strategy in the most effective way possible. They use a product-orientated approach, making the product first then selling it to the market – or so it seems. Google knows two things: 1) They have craploads of data, and 2) They own (pretty much) the biggest mass marketing device in the world. However they do know that even though they “own” this realm, they cannot control it. It’s like a pet – you own but cannot control it.

They way you control it is by feeding it. Such is the nature of open-source development. However Google is able to turn open-source into money by producing a good percentage of the product before open-sourcing it. This allows Google to keep the leash on the project. You developers aren’t building the product side by side – no: you are doing the grunt work that turns a framework into something consumers will love – something with the name Google slapped onto it.

Let’s move onto my third feeling. This is because of a trend I have noticed over time. Computers is no longer about being in full control of your data – it’s about being in full control of your data no matter where you are. Cloud computing sorts this out – it’s no wonder Google’s objective is “to be the hub through which all the world’s information passes through“. Sorry guys, but the fact is that most consumers want this. The only time they won’t is when the company providing it has a bad reputation – but Google? No, Google’s never been evil have they? Not to the average joe they haven’t. It’s the average joe that changes the workflow – it’s the average joe that makes such a way of working part of your daily routine.

You see, Chrome isn’t about making an operating system to do useful stuff – Chrome is all about changing people’s workflow to become web-centric. Instead of moving into the desktop market, what Google is doing is moving consumers into the web market.  Why do you think it’s named Chrome after their browser? It saves on the advertising costs. You advertise the OS, you advertise the browser. Google is pushing ahead HTML 5 specifications to redefine what the web is capable of, and their browser Chrome going to be the biggest, baddest boy in the playground that knows the meaning of the word “compatibility” backwards. Advertise them both at the same time – what you get are people getting the “wow” experience Google can provide with all its toolkits online from the browser, and making it easy as pie to integrate it into how they work. It’s not because Google Docs is simply an application that allows you to edit documents online, it’s because it’s a shared, accessible, compatible, synchronised alternative.

We cannot and should not fight.

Yes. My last point is so awesome it deserves its own special section.

You cannot fight once a market leader has made a choice on a product/system. We saw it with Windows and we may very well see it again. (I assume you have all seen Google Wave?) Instead we have to understand the market. What does the market want? How do we provide for it?

Now, I am a KDE user myself but what I see as major areas for Linux and DEs in general to focus on are:

  • Plasmoids (in KDE at least) – this is a stepping stone to integrate new technologies and the web into the desktop workflow
  • Provision of private clouds, complying with open-standards – for private, secure and PERSONALISED (imagine giving users the freedom to shape their cloud environment) mobility and synchronisation
  • The social desktop
  • The semantic desktop

Am I right, am I crazy, have I missed out stuff?

Shower me with your thoughts please.

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The Google Operating System – Chrome.

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Read Google’s original blog post about it.

That’s right, my conspiracy theory about Google (orignally posted a good month back) has come true, and it’s going to be out there around late 2010.

Brief summary: Google is making an operating system (Linux-based too) with help from the open-source community that focuses on getting the user online and into a browser as quick as possible. The browser is now the ultimate tool on the system. It is currently mainly meant for stuff like netbooks (note this is a separate project from Google Android) but will apparently also be able to provide a good experience for any desktop setup.

Since it’s too late to grimace at Google during their drawing board sessions, I like to ask myself what would an OS be in a time when many of our activites are web-centric.

Most of the main problems I outlined for Google in my conspiracy theory was how they could convice people to change their workflows. Apparently Google has decided to give them an operating system. This interface can easily be optimised to make it feel natural to shift their workflow completely into what they can do in a browser, some tabs and the new shabang HTML 5 will come with.

I took a look at Moblin, another netbook Linux-based OS – one thing instantly popped through my head: this doesn’t look like any window manager, it looks like a website or single application. Something you might expect similar to MythTV. (If I am wrong please correct me).

The first decision I would make on designing a UI for Google’s purposes is not to have any start menu. Something similar to Apple’s dock with modifications (also with an auto-hide) would be great for optimising screen real estate. I would also integrate what I now see as KDE Plasmoids as part of the entire interface (as in within applications itself too instead of only the desktop shell). I would also ask myself what applications could be and should be replaced by web applications. Such examples are email, document editing, chatting, and social networking. What could not and should not be are graphics and multimedia editors, games, and system management tools. It seems very much now that we can split our activities into 2: if you want to make technology, do it offline. If you want to use technology, do it online.

Personally, I can easily now see how easily I can adapt my workflow to this internet-centric pattern.

What about you? What do you expect from Google’s OS?

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Bing.com – another search engine from Microsoft

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

snapshot2Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’d have heard about Bing. Bing is Microsoft’s latest attempt at a search engine to challenge Google – and last Monday, they released it for public use. They did MSN search, Live! search, and now Bing. Let’s see if I can actually make a ’search engine review’ interesting and informative. I hope I did- but that’s for you to decide.

Now, I might not like Windows, but that doesn’t mean that Microsoft can only create crappy products. I’ve played Halo, and it’s fun too :) So I decided to try out Bing – this means only using it for all of my web searches throughout the week- and here I am with my review.

Bing is stressed as a “decision engine”, not a “search engine”. It’s meant to be able to provide useful information to help you solve tough decisions, instead of only being able to give you information on a subject – or at least that’s how their little beta introduction portrayed it to me.

I started with some basic searches – those searches that are meant to find out information. Google normally does pretty darn well on these by throwing me right at Wikipedia – you can’t go wrong there, but Bing apparently did. Searching up simple economics terminology (I had an economics exam) would throw me at past year economic sources, news articles, everything – except for “what it means“. A quick poke through some keywords proved that Bing didn’t use their search as a command line – in other words you could do fancy thing like `define: foo` or `"foo" -bar`. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you probably aren’t using Google effectively for your searches. Horrible first impression.

However, certain things did jump out, such as little tooltips that extend on the description, as well as more relevant searches and “links on results page”, oh, and a bunch of new fancy options on the Image search, as well as a load-on-demand thing that’s really nifty that you’ll just have to see for yourself. However, it’s no use saying how good the tech is, it’s better to see how useful the tech is.

So I then decided to see how good Bing was at being a “decision engine”. I threw a couple difficult questions I had floating around:

  • What career/university path would be suitable for me?
  • I have a hand condition called `hyperhidrosis`, how do I solve it?
  • How should I fix the exceptions “claims_sig_not_found” that a random guy’s OpenID library kept throwing at me?
  • How can I sync my Windows Mobile phone with Kontact on Linux?
  • What is the best picture to use for “Bing” on my blog post, seeing as the image keeps on changing on Bing.com.

As you can see, the questions were varied from being hypothetical, technical, specific, broad-knowledge, and finally image-based … respectively.

What career/university path would be suitable for me?

The first question was initially answered by a collection of “buy our free careers advice” websites. Little scams they were, that wasn’t too good. However some deeper poking found some good personality tests and career questionnaires.

Did it answer the question in the end? No.

Was I expecting it to? No.

I have a hand condition called `hyperhidrosis`, how do I solve it?

This was a pretty technical question. Hyperhidrosis is a condition where you sweat profusely in certain areas of your body – mine being hands and feet. It is normally triggered by certain materials, foods, sounds, etc. It was medical advice I was looking for. Bing fared pretty well on this one. Apparently I found quite a lot of cures, everything from botox injections, surgical lasers burning off my nerves, 30 minute soaks in baking soda to giving yourself a mild electrocution with a 12 volt battery. Needless to say I decided to leave the electrocution to a last resort.

Unfortunately it also enjoyed giving a bunch of scam websites too – but nevertheless those were inevitable to pop up, and after discarding those I did find some really good websites on the subject. So good that I actually did try soaking my hands for 30 minutes in a concentrated mixture of water and … uh, toothpaste – no baking soda. With a quick air-dry I managed to witnes instantaneous crystallisation on the back of my hand, and enjoyed a good 12 minutes of sweat free life.

Did it answer the question in the end? Yes.

Am I going to try out the cures? Maybe later.

How should I fix the exceptions “claims_sig_not_found” that a random guy’s OpenID library kept throwing at me?

This was an interesting one. I had used an OpenID library somebody else had coded for a PHP framework. However no matter how much I inserted traceback calls and tried to debug it- it kept on failing spectacularly. A quick test on my remote server showed it wasn’t a “it’s just you” problem, and several fresh installs failed the same way. The problem was, I didn’t know the name of the guy who coded it, it was somewhat outdated, and not exactly the most popular library in the world.

It did decently- up to the stage where I actually found out the guy’s name, actual email, and…well – it seems as though either Bing is living under a rock or nobody else except me and the creator uses this library. I’ve fallen back to using janrain’s OpenID PHP library, and that works flawlessly.

Did it answer the question? If the answer is “don’t ask the question”, then yes.

Am I happy with the answer? Yes.

How can I sync my Windows Mobile phone with Kontact on Linux?

I have a Windows Mobile phone, and I want to sync my PIM (personal information management – like calendar, todo, contacts, notes, alarms etc) with my computer. Turns out that the only thing Bing can say is that whatever exists is either outdated or non compatible with KDE4 and Kontact.

Did it answer the question? Failed horrendously. Stupid Bing. Not even a glimmer of hope.

Am I happy with the answer? What answer?

What is the best picture to use for “Bing” on my blog post, seeing as the image keeps on changing on Bing.com.

I’ll let the picture it chose speak for itself. The rest were even worse.

bing

Summary:

Is Bing comparable to Google? No. Realistically speaking, in a tie, Google will win.

What’s my idea on what would make a search engine so much more useful? An option to allow people to say “I am willing to spend money” or “I am not willing to spend money”.

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Beware of Google.

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

gooburnsGoogle is, actually, one of my top three disliked companies. The other two are Microsoft and Adobe. Why I dislike Microsoft and Adobe is a post for another day, but today I would like to talk about Google. Believe it or not, I will explain this without ONCE saying any personal bad experiences with Google’s services.

Google has recently unveiled at a developer preview their new product “Google Wave”. If you have not yet read about this, or watched the introduction video available on their webpage, I suggest you click here to go there now, and watch it.

If you have heard of it, and if you’ve watched the demo, you will be amazed. Not only have Google come up with a killer product, they’re going to open-source it, and developers will have access to the most amazing resources to produce the most amazing web applications possible. If you’re still reading and you haven’t watched the video, please go watch the video first.

Right – so the question is, why, especially if it’s open-sourced, are you against Google?

Try to look at it from this perspective. At this moment, we have three main operating systems, Linux, Mac and Windows, each with desktop applications built to cater for the underlying system. You might prefer one more than the other, and thus the more popular ones get more applications built, developers move to develop on the platform, and when the developers move, most users don’t realise this, but it’s where the developers like to go that determines what will progress and ultimately be used by you regular folks.

Right. So it’s a bit stupid to have a lot of competing technologies, and it’s obviously better to have one uniform system that just works ™ for all. That’s why we start to depreciate older technologies, merge together technologies, define standards, etc to make desktop systems more integrated, etc. This is well seen in stuff like KDE, GNOME, etc.

However, Google’s seen something a lot of others have been blinded about. The web is the only cross-platform, standardised system that exists. So whilst Microsoft, Linux and Apple go and fight their differences, Google, armed with its existing monopoly in the search engine system (yeah, indexes the internet, nice one) decides to take over the internet.

Here’s where you roll your eyes. But I’m not joking. Allow me to explain.

Since nobody can actually own the internet, Google has managed to think up another way of doing it. The plan starts with creating a lot of “uncanny” web applications. The uncanny valley was a concept used to describe the point at which one’s appreciation of technology due to its advancement changed to disgust because the technology became too “humanoid”. Eg: a humanoid robot only gets so awesome until it starts look identical to you, and better too, and with a hidden flamethrower. When used in the context of web apps, this is where the website’s interface mimics that of a desktop application. Like, for example: Google Docs.

This impresses a lot of users really quickly, as it allows them to do what was only previously possible if the software was installed on the system instead anywhere around the world with an internet connection and with a decent browser.

…and then Google starts releasing web APIs and toolkits to allow developers to take advantages of the systems it has created. This sounds really good, until you think about what else Google is doing.

Google releases their web browser, Google Chrome. Google Chrome is a breakthrough in certain technologies, allowing separate processes per tab, and support for some seriously cool javascript, ajax, whatever. Google’s aim in Chrome is “to show what the web is capable of”, pushing the limits, etc. With this browser, users can experience the best in uncanny websites, hence all functionality of your average desktop application can now, actually be done right in your browser. Again, Google Docs is a perfect example of this. Don’t believe me? Why don’t you try Photoshop in your browser, right now.

Once Google has a place in the browser market, they have every right to start sticking in their own ideas into the new HTML 5 standards. Now Google has their arsenal to define exactly what the browser is capable of. Together with their existing web toolkits and demos on the amazing stuff that is capable, who wouldn’t be happy to oblige?

Well, nobody. Google has made it so easy for the average person to access all of these great features. Even though Google Sites is a complete joke for web developers, for Joe down the street who can’t spell out HTML to save his life, Google Sites is amazing.

So people start switching. Because the technology behind it, too, is so impressive, developers start switching. In the end, what we now have is in effect “an operating system right in your browser“. Or as one person in IRC put it, another layer to depreciate the coding layers below it. Soon we will not need desktop applications any more, and everything will be done on the web. (of course there are also technical implications about this, like what will happen to the rest of the programming languages)

No, the web is still just through one browser you say, it’s not at all useful like that.

Actually, what about Chrome running as separate processes? What’s the difference between that and different applications? All that means is that instead of running KMail, your notetaking application, Pidgin, IRC client, OpenOffice and feed reader, now you’ll be running 6 or 7 Chrome separated tabs (so they’re just like individual applications) connected to GMail, Google Notepad, GTalk, Google Docs and Google Reader. In fact, you can have *deep breath*

google_evilGMail, Google Notepad, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk, Google Reader, Google Contacts, Google Desktop, Google Gears, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Sites, Google Books, Google Translate, Google Scholar, Google Medical Records, Google Directory, Google Groups, iGoogle, Google Adsense, Google Streetview, Google Sync, Google Android, Google Youtube, Google Analytics, Google 23andme, Google Lively, Google Dictionary, Google Voice, Google Feedburner, Google Chrome, Google Chrome OS, Google Public DNS, Google Go, Google Shopping, Google Checkout, Google Apps, Google News, Google Video, Google Blogspot, Google Finance, Google Sketchup, Google Orkut, Google Trends, Google Code, Google Picasa … and now Google Wave.

Every single thing to replace every single desktop application you’ll ever need save for some development tools. I swear I could actually live a year with only using Google Products.

So once people try to compete with the huge massive framework Google has created for itself, the only way to create competitive products is to either rebuild your own framework (which is likely to be extremely time consuming and impractical) or …. Use Google Toolkit and Google API and Google Code.

So even though Google doesn’t own the web, Google has taken over the web. It doesn’t matter if it’s open-sourced, if you have to use Google Toolkit to make anything decent, that’s “Google is here to define what can be done” for you. The ultimate czar of the Internet.

Welcome to the future, where nobody knows what “desktop application” means.

Edited Dec 09 to add 8 more Google products to the list.

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How to install Chromium (Google Chome) on Gentoo Linux

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Update: As of 27th August the buildbot now provides 64-bit builds. Thanks Jeff :)

The other day I was surfing the web and read an article about Google Chrome in some sort of hacking competition – this then prompted me to check out Google’s progress on porting Google Chrome to Linux and Mac. For those that don’t know Google Chrome is Google’s attempt at making a browser. So far it seems like a really good attempt.

It seems as though lately the Linux builds (I ignored the Mac stuff – but I hear it’s getting good too) seem to be getting to a usable state. Definitely not finished, definitely buggy, but usable. So, like any other Gentooer, I began trying to find out how to get it.

Step 1) Any ebuilds out there?

Why bother do hard work myself if somebody’s already put it in portage? With some google-fu it seems as though there are a couple ebuilds. One by the French, and another by the Chinese. The French one (have not tested) is available in the `THE` overlay, available by doing layman -a THE. The chinese one seems to be called “Shellex-overlay”, and can be accessed here. I’m not quite sure what the French one does as the ebuild didn’t really like my amd64 system (note: Google Chrome only supports 32-bit as of writing). However the Chinese one fared better and provided me with a binary. If you are on a 32-bit system (x86) you should try those ebuilds.

If you don’t want to compile from source, check the depencies list just a bit further down, then check out the build bot. Note: the build bot provides binaries for Windows, Linux AND Mac, so if you’re on a Mac, you’re in luck!

For more information, you should visit the Chromium Linux Building page.

Under `Prerequisites`, it lists down the dependencies as packaged by the Ubuntu system. Here is the list of dependencies as what Gentoo calls them:

  • Python >= 2.4
  • Perl >= 5.x
  • gcc >= 4.2
  • bison >= 2.3
  • flex >= 2.5.34
  • gperf >= 3.0.3
  • pkgconfig >= 0.20
  • nss >= 3.12
  • gconf
  • glib
  • gtk-engines-murrine
  • nspr
  • corefonts
  • freetype
  • cairo
  • dbus

Their version requirements are listed as needed.

Step 2) What about 64-bit systems?

There are several techniques of getting Chromium on a 64-bit system. However no matter what, I highly recommend that you create a 32-bit chroot. If you want to track each library individually and symlink your system to hell (as I first attempted), be my guest, but you’re wasting your time. So, first create a chroot by following this nifty guide.

Once you’ve got your chroot up, you can either try out the ebuilds I mentioned before, compile it yourself from source (via Google’s instructions) or be lazy and grab the binary from the Chromium build bot. I have tested the latter two techniques (can’t trust the French nor the Chinese!). To compile it yourself from source, follow the Chromium Linux Building page. Note: you will require quite a bit of HD space (the sources tarball itself is 640MB+), I also suggest you bootstrap from the tarball, the subversion checkout seems a lot longer and a waste of time really. Finally, if you’re just interested in getting the binary and running Chrome (not development), I would do use Release mode (see the building page for instructions). Of course, after making sure you have the dependencies I listed above, you should have Chrome compiled!

If you’re lazy and don’t want to compile, there is a build bot.

Step 3) Run Chromium on Linux!

At this stage, you should have the Chrome binary (either by compiling from source or ebuild, or getting the build bot binary). Now you just have to run the program and enjoy. If you’re running using the chroot, you should use the xhost hack. Do xhost local:localhost outside the chroot, then try run the binary again. Obviously you don’t want to waste time setting up X in the chroot.

Finally, here is a screenshot of Chromium running on Fluxbox! (I normally use KDE, but I wanted a more lightweight WM when compiling Chromium) You might also consider doing nice -n 10 when compiling if you want to continue doing your stuff. In fact, I’m running Chrome right now on KDE to write this post. It’s very fast, uses about 1% CPU, separates itself into different processes per tab, and so far seems pretty “stable”. However I have found that opening a file browse dialog (eg: in an upload form) makes Chromium jump up to about 50% CPU, which sucks.


Any thanks, issues or problems feel free to ask.

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