The Chromium Projects

Search this site

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, and examples are licensed under the BSD License.

The Chromium OS designs and code are preliminary. Expect them to evolve.
For Developers‎ > ‎How-Tos‎ > ‎

Mac OS X Roadmap

This page may not be kept up to date with the current focus areas for Chromium for Mac OS X.

You can also see chromestatus.com which stays updated with the web platform additions and changes.

Additionally the chromium bug tracker's metabugs give an idea of some of the larger features.

Goal: Stable/Feature Parity

Now that we will have an initial beta release under our belts real soon now, our goal is to fill in the missing features and release on a regular schedule. WinChrome's track record demonstrates our desire to release early and often (4 major releases in about a year), so expect frequent releases that add needed functionality and improve the user experience. The majority of the tracking for this milestone will be in the bug system, and as soon as we determine what it entails, we'll link the appropriate keyword queries here.

The following are all things needed for feature parity with windows/linux, in no particular order.
  • App mode
    • Heavy refactoring work has been done to allow this, needs further design to complete implementation vision.
  • Bookmark manager
    • Available in dev channel since 4.0.295.0.
    • Available in beta channel since 5.0.307.7.
  • Cookie manager
    • Available in dev channel since 4.0.295.0.
    • Available in beta channel since 5.0.307.7.
  • Full-screen
    • Mostly working, but had enough bugs we had to pull from beta.
    • Design doc on how we want it to behave in edge cases is linked off from http://crbug.com/24893.
  • Font and language settings
    • Available in dev channel since 4.0.288.1.
    • Available in beta channel since 5.0.307.7.
    • Language settings need to be hooked up from the System Preferences settings.
  • Task manager
    • Available in dev channel since 4.0.302.2.
    • Available in beta channel since 5.0.307.7.
  • Extensions and page actions
    • Available in dev channel since 4.0.288.1.
    • Available in beta channel since 5.0.307.7.
  • Bookmark Sync
    • Available in dev channel since 4.0.288.1.
    • Available in beta channel since 5.0.307.7.
  • PDF viewing inline
    • Design discussions in progress.
  • 64 bit
    • Some work has been spec'd, mostly gated on V8 performance tuning in 64bit.
We are still working out the definitions of M5 and M6 (beta? stable? etc.), but in the meantime, you can watch those milestones as an indicator of what will show up in the upcoming larger release. 

Important, but lesser goals:

TestShell

TestShell is a single-process test harness for the Chromium architecture. It serves several purposes which made it a good initial goal for the Mac effort:

  • It exercises the Chromium resource loaders to handle file and network i/o outside of WebCore, a first step to isolating the renderer
  • It exercises WebCore rendering into a bitmap instead of directly to a NSView, a requirement for multi-process display
  • Being single-process, it's significantly easier to debug rendering/layout issues before we get everything fully operational
  • It supports automated testing and unit testing

We are building WebCore using PLATFORM(CHROMIUM) instead of PLATFORM(MAC) which is used by Safari.

We are also building and running the test_shell_tests suite to test the glue layer and exercise the test harness.

Pass All WebKit Layout Tests

Currently, we are able to pass approximately 97% of the all-important WebKit layout tests (slightly less with pixel tests enabled)!! We have known issues with text fields not rendering with the correct width which throws off many of them, and the lack of plug-in support is another large batch of failures. The tests are running on the buildbots to ensure we don't regress anything.

For those interested in helping drive the list of known failures to zero, see src/webkit/tools/layout_tests/test_lists/tests_fixable.txt.

Weekly Status

This is now tracked in the dev channel release notes. The weekly notes just took too much time to compile, and are redundant given that we're now doing regular releases to the dev-channel.