2009-05-22

Chrome on the Mac (kind of)  

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Catching up on some TV last night, I saw a reference to the Windows 7 Release Candidate. Visting the Microsft site, I saw that the download was an .ISO package - basically a pre-burned disk image intended to be a bootable DVD to facilitate the installation of Windows 7. And then it clicked: VMWare can create new virtual machines out of .ISO files. I could run Windows 7 on my Mac. Which means I could run Chrome on my Mac!

Getting Windows running on my Mac was shockingly easy. All told it took about an hour. Here's what I did:

  • Download the .ISO file from Microsoft's site (choose the 32-bit version), get a license key for the evaluation copy
  • In VMWare, click "New"
  • Select Windows Vista, point to the downloaded .ISO file and provide your license key
  • Wait and watch as VMWare builds your Windows machine
Once done, I fired up the virtual machine, and Windows 7 loaded flawlessly. Fired up IE, downloaded Chrome, and there you had it: I was now running Chrome on my Mac.

On the shuttle into work this morning, I tried using just Chrome inside of the Windows 7 virtual machine to see if I could use it as my primary browser. It was rock solid, and noticeably faster than Firefox on the Mac. (Which, when you think about the computing shenanigans going on, is rather remarkable.)

The Release candidate is valid for a year (though it'll start degrading itself by doing bi-hourly shutdowns in March, 2010), which means that if you have a copy of VMWare, you can run Windows 7 for the next 12 months for free. Of course, Chrome on the Mac will be released natively ahead of that... but in the meantime, this isn't a bad way to test out a new OS while also getting a screaming-fast browser as part of the bargain.

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