Not Holding Breath for Chrome

Amarok Blog

Tuesday, September 2. 2008

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean

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I read the Chrome comic on Monday. It goes into technical detail in describing what their justification was for creating Chrome. By and large I think they succeeded: on the whole, Chrome doesn't appear to be a case of not-invented-hereism. They really do have some different ideas of how to do the browser, both technically and in the UI.

So yesterday I knew two things: Chrome was going to be crossplatform and the 30pg+ comic that went into some detail didn't say how they were planning to do that or anything about their UI toolkit.

So after poking at the code for a bit, it comes to no great surprise that crossplatform wasn't a big concern from the start. Currently the Linux version doesn't actually run, according to its website. And their UI toolkit choices might indeed have been based on some NIHism and are certainly not the most Linux or OS X friendly. Given how easy it is to create a crossplatform app if you make the correct early decisions, this is a bit frustrating.

They use Skia, a graphics library for Android for basic image display. And they have "Chromium Views" which mostly seem to be used to abstract between XP and Vista. It could theoretically be extended and used for crossplatform abstraction (just what the world needs - another xplatform api).

And why not Qt? "Existing UI toolkits for Windows are similarly unsatisfying, with limited widget sets, unnatural aesthetics, or awkward programming models. " Doesn't jive with my experience of Qt. But I guess I'm a bit partisan.

I do think that promising cross-platform support might have been a bit disingenuous of them, time will tell for sure. I suspect that if Linux desktop users do see Chrome, it will most likely be in the form of existing browsers incorporating some of their technology or ideas.

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I think the main reason for not using Qt or other toolkits was that they wanted their download to be less than 10 megabytes. Having such a simplistic UI, it certainly makes sense to some degree to have just a very simple abstraction layer.

#1 Ensulatio Dartondi on 2008-09-04 06:08 (Reply)

I totally agree, too bad there are not using Qt, especially now that Qt is itself including Webkit and a JavaScript engine !

#2 rix on 2008-09-04 06:50 (Reply)

Fact is, that Chromium Views aren't used to abstract between XP and Vista but to port a Vista look over to XP - making Chrome look a terribly foreign material in an XP environment like Apple's Safari.

#3 Robert (Homepage) on 2008-09-07 13:33 (Reply)

Hmm, I may be talking nonsense, but Chromium is, as far as I know, released under BSD license. Qt is released under GPL. By using Qt, Google would have to purchase a proprietary license for releasing Google Chrome, and would have to license Chromium under GPL.

In other words, if they set BSD license as one of their goals, then using Qt would be impossible.

#4 Ivan Vučica on 2008-09-20 10:15 (Reply)

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