Google is tight-lipped about the Linux version of its Chrome browser, but the company's programmers have proved a bit more forthcoming with a brief announcement that they have a crude version of Chrome working on Linux.
"Dude, Gmail works in the test shell on Linux!" said programmer Dan Kegel in a note to the Chromium developers mailing list on Tuesday. It is pretty crude, though: the "enter" key does not work, for example.
Chromium is the name of the open source project behind Chrome. But what is a "test shell"?
Aaron Boodman, who works on Chrome and Gears and spotlighted the Linux accomplishment, had this explanation in his blog post about the Linux Chrome milestone: "The test shell is a very simple browser that the Chromium development team uses for testing our integration with WebKit", the engine that decodes HTML to render a Web page in the browser. "It is the first step of porting Chromium to a new platform."
In other words, Chrome for Linux is in a pretty raw state.
"The team is still a long ways from even getting the Web to render correctly, let alone building the real browser UI (user interface). But it's exciting to see things falling a little more into place each day," Boodman said.
Kegel also indicated in a later e-mail that V8, the engine that runs JavaScript programs on Web pages, is functioning, because he was able to run a JavaScript benchmark test called SunSpider.
"I just did a shootout between test shell and Firefox on Linux by pasting the SunSpider public URL in each. Happily, it ran to completion on both," Kegel said.
This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.
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