CrossOver Chromium: Ain’t Workin’

Google Chromium’s logo. Still waiting for a full Linux release. | Wikipedia Commons

Wine is the leading program that allows Linux users to run Windows software on their desktops, including productivity suites and games. (Nerds: Don’t call it an emulator. Wine’s name is an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator.") So far, it’s been great for my old copies of AutoCAD 2000, the Macromedia MX suite, and even the handful of games I have and never play, like good old Sid Meyer’s Gettysburg! and Tomb Raider II, from back when computers sounded like jet engines.

And what about browsers? Mmmmmnope. Both Internet Explorer and Safari can start up using Wine, but crash the second I try navigating to an actual Web page. And Google’s rather lovely new Chrome browser has the same problem, despite one project trying to fix it.

CrossOver Chromium is designed to allow Mac and Linux users to run Chromium, the open-source basis for Chrome, by repackaging the software and priming it for Unix. CrossOver Chromium seems to run independently of Wine, but like all other CodeWeavers projects, is still based on it.

Unfortunately, CrossOver Chromium starts up like IE and Safari, and gets as far as loading a half-digested page, before it crashes like the others.

I like Chrome a lot. It has much of the sophisticated functionality of Firefox, but with a cleaner presentation and some cool quirks, like how easy it is to save a symlink file. It’s a fast browser—in my experience in WinXP, faster than Firefox 3.0—although well behind smokin’ Firefox 3.5. But Chrome’s claims about multi-threading tabs (basically, each tab gets its own memory allocation, which something something better) seem overblown so far. That might be why Chrome hasn’t put much of a dent in Firefox’s ascent to browser domination. Worse, neither Chrome nor Chromium have versions native to Linux.

But Chrome, only a year old, might well become an important browser. So I’ll have to wait until either Chrome comes to Linux or CrossOver Chromium starts working properly to figure out exactly why my photo albums don’t work properly in anything not based on Gecko. In the mean time, my backup browser will remain Opera. End.