So, I’ve stated how I feel about web browsers. Very few are devoid fatal flaws that bug me to the point of being unable to use them. To that end, I decided to take matters into my own hands by downloading and compiling my own version of Chromium.
As previously stated, Chromium has proven to be an excellent browser. It is minimal, functional, fast, expandable. The only issue I could find with it was it’s lack of conformity with the rest of Mac OS X in terms of handling selections in the location bar. The developers of Chromium decided to follow the convention of single click selects all in the location bar, following the cue of Internet Explorer. This however is contrary to the functionality of similar text fields in pretty much every other place in the Mac OS, including that of Safari. This incongruity was beyond my ability to cope, rendering the browser useless to me.
I pleaded my case, along with many others, at the Chromium developer forums, however they said it was a non-issue, and marked the bug as “WontFix.” So, I decided to make my own version with this deliberate behavior remedied. So I downloaded the source. 6.4 GB later I located the 6 offending lines of code, spent 1.5 hours making a cool Mac-themed icon, and spent 2.5 hours compiling on all 8 processors. The outcome? Success! Now, I will offer this for download, and as long as it continues to be usable and a good browser, Chromium may very well replace FireFox for the first time in 10 years as my browser of choice.
Download link?
It used to be available at chromiumformac.com, however since there seemed to be little interest i let it lapse. I haven’t compiled it since version 16. I’m actually interested in updating my repository and compiling. If I do, I will post a link here.