CodeWeavers brings Chromium to Mac, Linux

Application-portability software developer CodeWeavers has ported a version of Chromium to Mac OS X and Linux, and made the web browser available for free.

The company, which specialises in making software work on other operating systems, has built a reputation for allowing applications such as Microsoft Office to run on Linux.

In a blog post, CodeWeavers' chief executive, Jeremy White, said the company had published freely available Mac and Linux browsers based on Chromium, the open-source code that underpins Google's Chrome. Google has said it is working on Mac and Linux versions of Chrome, but it has not published them yet.

White said CodeWeavers had been looking for a way to show off the maturity of the Wine emulation software that the company uses.

"On Thursday, 4 September, I called a company fire drill," he wrote. "I said I wanted to ship ported versions of Chromium for Mac and Linux, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible. By Friday, we had a first working build." After ironing out a number of major bugs, the software was ready after a week.

"Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be," White wrote. "In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux."