Google Chrome Portable

This post was written 3 years 5 months 4 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

Well, I may have been left less than impressed but people are using Google Chrome and so, as a web developer, I need to make sure my sites are compatible.

However, I don’t necessarily want a full-time installation, so someone has kindly created a portable version of Chrome (based on the open-source version, Chromium).

But should I bother testing with Google Chrome? Google say…

If you’ve tested your website with Safari 3.1 then your site should already work well on Google Chrome.

This is based on the fact that it’s built on Web Kit, the same as Safari.

However, they’ve been very careful with their words. Safari 3.1 is not the latest version – that used WebKit 525.13, the same as Google Chrome. The latest version of Safari is 3.1.2 and includes WebKit 525.21, which has a number of vulnerability and general security fixes.

On top of that Google Chrome is using its own JavaScript engine.

The fact that both produce different Acid3 test scores should be the indicator here that they’re NOT the same. I’d therefore say, no, you can’t test your site on Safari and then be confident it works on Chrome.