Chromium ported to N900

April 12, 2010 | 12:44

Tags: #browser #chromium #maemo #n900 #nokia-n900 #smartphone

Companies: #chrome #nokia

Nokia's flagship smartphone, the N900, just got another exclusive in the mobile marketplace: a port of the open-source Chromium web browser, based on Google's Chrome project.

As reported over on Engadget, the move is an unofficial port of the Chromium sourcecode to run on the Maemo Linux platform that forms the core of Nokia's top-end N900 smartphone.

Based around the Chromium package originally developed for the Debian Linux distribution, the port is described as "a little buggy," but for those willing to put up with a few niggles it offers some features that are likely to come as a welcome surprise to those used to the traditional cut-down web browsers found in smartphones.

Perhaps the most impressive - and one that iPhone and iPad owners will be green with jealousy over - is support for Flash content, including full video playback. While it's not quite up to HD content, it does run standard definition video from sites like YouTube acceptably.

Another score for the Chromium port is that it passes the Acid3 test with flying colours, scoring a full 100 and managing to produce a final result exactly matching the reference rendering.

For N900 owners who want to try the Chromium port for themselves, full instructions for the manual installation can be found over on the Maemo Arena website.

Do you think that Chromium could be the next big mobile browser, or is the idea of running a desktop browser on a portable device a no-go from a user interface perspective? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Discuss this in the forums

Posted by NickCPC - Mon Apr 12 2010 11:52

Chromium on an N900 sounds good to me! I'm still waiting for Fennec for my N95 though...

Posted by eddtox - Mon Apr 12 2010 12:49

The N900 is the best device I've ever owned.

The microB browser which ships as default is awesome. It runs youtube perfectly as well as having a good go at most other flash. Firefox on the N900 has some nice touches but overall I find myself using microB 99% of the time.

I'm hoping the PR 1.2 OS update will enable flash HW acceleration so I can watch BBC iPlayer smoothly (it's a bit hit-and-miss atm)

Posted by javaman - Mon Apr 12 2010 13:05

Wonder if they'll release it for other mobile devices. If they wanna seriously challange the mobile market they're gonna have to. Guess it doesn't support multi touch either since they released on the N900 which has a resistive screen. If they can get that working then it could possibly make a great browser for the likes of the HP slate.

Posted by Vigilante - Mon Apr 12 2010 13:14

Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly, but since the device runs a version of linux, it should run chromium directly after being built from source for the platform, no?

What's the actual differences between this and the standard linux build? The interface is already pretty streamlined (and from what I can tell, the interface has remained exactly the same on this version anyway), so I'm just wondering how it classifies as a port.
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