Google Chrome coming to the Mac

Today, we get a nice, bland update from Google: “Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along fine,” says a post on the Google Blog. It seems a bit surprising that it’s taken this long for Google to get it working perfectly on the Mac, especially considering that the man behind the excellent Camino browser (a Mac-only browser built by Mozilla) is leading the project for Google.

But the keyword is “perfectly” — as Google notes, “It’s important to us that the Mac port of Chromium feels and performs like a native Mac application, and that it provides the kind of high-quality experience Mac users expect.”

Here is a summary of the blog post:

Fortunately, on Mac OS X, the OS APIs for sandboxing a process are easy to use and straightforward. When Chromium starts a renderer process, we open an IPC channel (a UNIX socketpair) back to the browser process before turning on the sandbox. Any resources a process owns before turning on the sandbox stay with the process, so this channel can still be used after the sandbox is enabled. We don’t need to do anything else, as Apple‘s sandbox API is smart enough to allow access to file descriptors passed between processes in this manner even if the receiving process itself is forbidden from calling open(). There is no documentation available about which privileges each API needs, such as whether they need access to on-disk files, or call other APIs to which the sandbox restricts access.

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