Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Sergey Brin: Chrome for Mac still unstable

By | October 23, 2009, 2:45am PDT

As the saying goes, good things come to those who wait. If that’s true, Google’s Chrome Web browser for Mac should be great.

The wait will have to go on a bit longer, says Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who made a surprise visit to the Web 2.0 Summit and took the question about the browser from an attendee. Actually, there is an early developer version that anyone can use (Sergey says he’s using it) but he warns that it’s still somewhat unstable.

There are a lot of things that I’m looking forward to in Chrome for Mac, particularly a stability feature that keeps other browser tabs humming in case there’s a hang-up in one of them. Sergey says he’s suffering along with us without Chrome for Mac. It’s been 13 months since the Windows release and he - and I - would have hoped to at least have had a beta version.

I could download the developer’s version but why would I want to be frustrated by an unstable experience when I can just wait a while longer for at least a beta version.

Previous coverage:

Google Chrome for Mac: Still not ready

Hey Sergey: Where’s my Mac version of Chrome?

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Topics

Sam has been a technology and business blogger for more than 18 years.

Disclosure

Sam Diaz

Sam Diaz has nothing to disclose.

Biography

Sam Diaz

Sam has been a technology and business blogger, reporter and editor at ZDNet, the Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News and Fresno Bee for more than 18 years. He's a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and a graduate of California State University, Fresno.

Related Discussions on TechRepublic

Did you know you can take part in these discussions with your ZDNet membership?
15
Comments

Join the conversation!

Just In

Well...
zkiwi Updated - 24th Oct 2009
If you have such a low opinion of Google, then considering the abysmal instability track record of your paramour Microsoft, then why do you even like Microsoft, its products, or its management?
0 Votes
+ -
You can find Chrome on...
betelgeuse68 23rd Oct 2009
Windows you Mac fanboy.

If nothing else use VMWare's Unity, I doubt Chrome will "look & feel likea Mac
app."

-M
0 Votes
+ -
Developer release.
A none mouse Cow Herd 23rd Oct 2009
I'm posting this with the Dev release of Google Chrome, and
it's really quite good. A little unstable, but certainly not
unusable!
0 Votes
+ -
That's surprising
eMJayy 23rd Oct 2009
The Chromium browser running on Ubuntu is very stable and
has all the features of Chrome 3 for Windows. I've
encountered very few problems while using it. Sounds like
the mac version has fallen behind.
Who ever said we wanted Chrome?
0 Votes
+ -
"we"?
callandor87 23rd Oct 2009
Do you claim to speak for all the OS X users in
the world?
0 Votes
+ -
I'm a Mac user
PacoBell 24th Oct 2009
And I absolutely ABHOR Safari! Chromium FTW!
0 Votes
+ -
Chrome for Windows ain't that great either
HollywoodDog 23rd Oct 2009
Often my resource usage shoots, up and things slow to a
crawl, I have to ctl+alt+del to get out of it.
0 Votes
+ -
SL Effect?
odcchaz 23rd Oct 2009
Perhaps they're trying to optimize it for Snow Leopard. A
native 64 bit browser with multi threading (each tab?)
would be pretty nice.

I'd love a Chrome that I could log in to (Google ID), and
then my bookmarks would show up on any machine I'm using,
for that instance. Hmm, I wonder if that's what Chrome
Os will be.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Sergey Brin: Chrome for Mac still unstable
Loverock Davidson 23rd Oct 2009
A Google product that is unstable? Can't say I'm surprised, that's always been the way their company has operated.
0 Votes
+ -
Well...
zkiwi Updated - 24th Oct 2009
If you have such a low opinion of Google, then considering the abysmal instability track record of your paramour Microsoft, then why do you even like Microsoft, its products, or its management?
0 Votes
+ -
Recently chrome is hanging the moment I open the browser and the only way to get out is take turn the power off.. I have been loving the browser .. but looks like the time to switch...
0 Votes
+ -
The problem is that OS X sucks
NonZealot 23rd Oct 2009
Things that are easy to do in every other OS are simply too difficult and / or too unstable in OS X. They'll never get Chrome working properly until Apple gets a proper multi-threaded, multi-user, networked OS.
0 Votes
+ -
NZ, you are a moron...
prof123 23rd Oct 2009
OS X is much more stable than Windows... but why am I
telling you this, you know this already and you are just
baiting people ... Good luck with Win 7..
0 Votes
+ -
Nah...
zkiwi 24th Oct 2009
I'm sure you're still in denial.
0 Votes
+ -
Agree with eMJayy ;
mhenriday 24th Oct 2009
I'm running development versions of both Chrome and Chromium on my 64-bit Ubuntu Karmic beta setups and find them very stable - they never crash. The only thing I'm missing compared with the Windows version of Chrome is the ability to sync my bookmarks across computers (OS) ; everything else seems to function equally well. Not having any experience with Macs, I can't point to anything in OS X that would make adapting Chrome to it more difficult than doing so for a fellow Unix OS like Ubuntu. Given that Google seems to devote far more resources to getting its apps to work on Mac than on Linux (cf the rather sorry history of not making the Picasa 3.5 upgrade directly available to Linux users), I'm surprised to hear that Chrome for Mac remains unstable....

Henri

Join the conversation!

Formatting +
BB Codes - Note: HTML is not supported in forums
  • [b] Bold [/b]
  • [i] Italic [/i]
  • [u] Underline [/u]
  • [s] Strikethrough [/s]
  • [q] "Quote" [/q]
  • [ol][*] 1. Ordered List [/ol]
  • [ul][*] · Unordered List [/ul]
  • [pre] Preformat [/pre]
  • [quote] "Blockquote" [/quote]
ie8 fix

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources
ie8 fix