As I just said, I like shiny new toys, so when I got the email earlier today inviting me to enjoy the Linux beta of Google’s Chrome browser, I dropped everything and went to check it out.
I was disheartened to find the following:
“Get Google Chrome (BETA)
It’s free and installs in seconds
New! For Linux
(Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE)”
Uh oh. Really? Because I don’t run any of those flavours of Linux. Never one to overanalyze before trying to install something on my computer, I downloaded the 32-bit Fedora/openSUSE .rpm for my Mandriva 2009.1 system. I figured openSUSE and Fedora aren’t the same thing, so maybe the .rpm would be general enough for another .rpm-based system. The Mandriva software installer ran, detected some dependencies, and was silent. I didn’t find Chrome in the menu afterwards, but typing google-chrome in a terminal started it up.
It imported my bookmarks from Firefox. I’ve tested it on Google Mail, Mandriva forums, and YouTube, and found no problems yet. That’s right, Flash video worked out of the box. Early days, of course. I hope there will be official and explicit support for all distros in the very near future. For now, I’m just pleased that when I signed up to be updated when Google released Chrome for Linux, it didn’t turn out to be simply a gesture.