Google Chrome on Mac OS X

September 4th, 2008 · Comments

While many Mac OS X users are awaing a Mac port of the recently released Google Chrome web browser, I was able to uninstall Safari, Firefox, and Opera completely from my system today. I am in fact, running Google Chrome under Mac OS X (click for a larger view):

It’s a bit hackish, but I was able to do this thanks to VMware Fusion, which for $79, lets you run applications from Microsoft Windows or just about any other x86 operating system side-by-side with Mac OS X applications. You might think it’s slow, but this combination actually runs faster than Firefox 3.0.1 does natively (and not just for Javascript). Here are the results from two benchmarks I ran today (tho first two I found by searching for javascript benchmarks on Google): The Web Browser Javascript Benchmark and the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark:

So, how did I set this up?

The first thing I did was download the lastest VMware Fusion release (2.0RC), because I wasn’t sure if Unity mode (side-by-side application sharing) was available in 1.1 (it is). All you have to do to enter unity mode is go to View -> Enter Unity. You can then start Chrome and have it display side-by-side with everything else.

In order to make this a more ‘Mac like experience’, you should visit your Virtual Machines directory (usually under ~/Documents). Navigate to your Windows XP Professional.vmwarevm file in Finder, then right click to select “Show Package Contents”. This will reveal a hidden ‘Applications’ directory, with an application aptly called “Google Chrome – Windows XP Professional’. Copy this to /Applications, and then drag it to your dock. If you click on it, you now have Chrome application running under Mac OS X:

If you want to make this your default web browser under Mac OS X, you have to start Safari up, and then visit Preferences -> General, and browse for the Google Chrome Application you just made.

One thing you may want to do for a better experience is adjust the keyboard shortcuts in VMware (Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse) so that Chrome under Windows uses the same keyboard shortcuts as Safari or Firefox does under Mac OS X:

Change the Cmd (Cloverleaf) key to map to Ctrl instead of the Windows key
Disable the Cmd-W to Alt-F4 shortcut

You will also want to add your Mac OS X Desktop as a shared folder (read/write) that can be seen by Chrome, so that you can download things using it. After this, Chrome will act like any other Mac OS X web browser (yes, youtube still works). The only thing I haven’t got to work in it yet is printing (to a PDF or printer), but that is likely a problem with my VMware configuration. I am glad that I finally have a real reason to use VMware, after buying it a year ago. I am also looking forward to a native Mac OS X build, especially now that I know the author of Camino is working on it.