Chrome now works on Linux, crudely
Google is tight-lipped about the Linux version of its Chrome browser, but the company's programmers have proved a bit more forthcoming with a brief announcement that they have a crude version of Chrome working on Linux.
"Dude, Gmail works in the test shell on Linux!" said programmer Dan Kegel in a note to the Chromium developers mailing list on Tuesday. It's pretty crude, though: the "enter" key doesn't work, for example. Chromium is the name of the open-source project behind Chrome. But what's a "test shell"?
Aaron Boodman, who works on Chrome and Gears and spotlighted the Linux accomplishment, had this explanation in his blog post about the Linux Chrome milestone: "The test shell is a very simple browser that the Chromium development team uses for testing our integration with WebKit," the engine that decodes HTML to render a Web page in the browser. "It is the first step of porting Chromium to a new platform."
