General
Q. What license is the source released under?A. Chromium is a collection of a lot of software with a variety of licenses, but the main body of code is BSD. For more info, see
the full breakdown.
WebKit
Q. How are you tracking WebKit?
A. The Chromium source code includes a copy of the WebKit source. We frequently snapshot against the WebKit tip of tree or specific branches according to our release needs.
Our goal is to reduce the size and complexity of the differences between the copy we maintain in order to work more effectively as a participant in the WebKit community and also to make periodic updates occur more smoothly.
Q. How are you interfacing with WebKit for upstream updates?
A. We take periodic snapshots of the WebKit code, making the necessary changes to integrate with Chromium. We are working with the WebKit team to push many of our changes upstream so that the merge process is simpler.
Q. Does Chromium support 64-bit architectures?Q. Does Chromium build a working UI on Mac or Linux?A. No, not yet. We have ported and are building some very important building blocks, but we do not have a finished working interface on either platform. Read more:
Platforms and Priorities.
Q. Well when will it be ready on Mac and Linux?
A. Porting to a completely new platform is a lot of work that will take some time. We are working extremely hard, and we expect some impressive results in the coming months. You should expect to wait months, and not days, until there is something you can use.
A. Not really. Better support for running under Wine was investigated, but we're concentrating our efforts on a full native port. See
the Wine AppDB entry for more information.
A. We're too early in the port to have incorporated a toolkit. Most of the custom drawing goes through a library called Skia, which is comparable to Cairo in that it draws lines and rectangles but not buttons and checkboxes.
Many people have strong opinions about the toolkit, and part of the reason it's so divisive is because both libraries are quite capable of meeting Chromium's needs. In fact, because most of Chromium is just custom rendering for showing a web page -- for example, even the popup of an HTML <select> control is custom-drawn by WebKit -- we anticipate the only real places the toolkit will be visible are in the way some form controls look and in various dialogs like the preferences and "save as" dialogs.
With all of that said, the plan is to use GTK. It's not due to any dislike of Qt, but just because there's more experience on the team with GTK and it matches the existing Firefox dependency on Linux. Please keep calm. :)
Misc
Q. I noticed that Gears source code has moved to the Chromium code repository. Why is that?
A.
With Gears as a plug-in to Chromium we're carrying two copies of sqlite
and two copies of V8. That's silly. We're integrating the
code so Gears can run great in Chromium. We plan to continue to
build Gears for other browsers out of the same code base.
Q. How can I develop extensions for Chromium like in Firefox?
A. Chromium doesn't have an extension system yet. This is something we're interested in adding in a future version. Note that Chromium does support NPAPI-style "plugins", such as Adobe Flash and Apple QuickTime.
