This is good news for Mac users being pissed off that Google Chrome is Windows only for now. Mike Pinkerton is the main man (and a Google employee, says Venturebeat) behind the excellent non-bloated Gecko-based Camino web browser for OS X. Gecko being the rendering engine used by Firefox as well, while Chrome uses Webkit, of Safari fame.
Pinkerton said this on his personal blog:
Two things opened up for me today. First, I’m allowed to talk about my project at Google. Second, it once again involves working directly with the open source community, something I’ve really enjoyed over the last ten years with Mozilla. I’m talking about the public release of the Chromium project and Google Chrome.
This is good news, as anyone who’ve tried out Camino can understand. Users of said browser needn’t worry though:
How does this affect Camino? In the short term, it doesn’t at all. Plans for Camino 2.0 based on the Gecko 1.9 are underway and unchanged. I have some super-reviews to do for smorgan tomorrow that’ll get us closer to 2.0alpha status. There shouldn’t be any talk of “doom” or “gloom” because really nothing has changed.
No word on launch date or anything in the post, of course. I should also point out that this is Pinkerton’s private blog, and he makes it perfectly clear that he’s not speaking for Google at this point.
Don’t forget about Chromium! I really want to see a version of chrome, or at least a thin, lean version of a webkit based browser that I can pull onto my linux box. Firefox is getting waaay too bloated.