Crossovers Chromium

Codeweavers released Crossover Chromium today, which runs Google's Chromium Browser in the Crossovers/WINE environment. They disclaim that it's not really polished yet, and was released in this state mostly to show how quickly it could be done.

I downloaded it to give it a try anyway. It took a couple of minutes to start up for the first time. Runs fine although scrolling is a bit jumpy on the iMac Core Duo I'm testing it on. Like all apps running in WINE it has a few font issues from where the original app was designed to use the commercial Windows fonts: text is displayed instead using freely available fonts, so there are display glitches such as button labels overflowing the buttons.



Due to the font issues, CxChromium can't really be used for proofing final web page designs because the pages won't look quite like they would in Windows -- but for functional testing it is a nice tool to have in the web developers' toolkit.

Plus, it gives a way for Mac users without VMware/Parallels/Virtualbox/etc to try out Google Chromium and find out what all the fuss is about.