I’ve successfully downloaded the Chromium source and completed a successful build:
The source is delivered as a Visual Studio 2005 solution, making it relatively straightforward for Windows developers who have this installed. You also need the Windows SDK, but other than that there are few dependencies.
Chromium is not quite the same as Google Chrome. The logo is shades of blue, rather than Chrome’s red green and yellow, and the word Google does not appear at top right in the title bar. If you squint carefully, you can also see that it is a later build: 0.2.151.0 instead of Chrome’s 0.2.149.27 – both at the time of writing.
Oh, and I believe you can download and build without agreeing the onerous Google EULA that is attracting some discussion.
Wow, looks like you’ve been busy with chrome 🙂
It is very nice that Google open sources Chrome in a way that the source is newer then the browser itself and not the other way around allthough this does make security issues easier to find.
I’ve been trying to build Chromium on windows and have had some trouble.
Could you help me?
I’ve followed the build documentation and installed all the prerequisites but when I build (F6) The following error always appears:
“fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: ‘v8.h’: No such file or directory”
which refers to the line #include “v8.h” (line 17 JSBridge.h).
I am relatively new to C++ esp. in visual studio and I think understand the error, however since the directories to include for a project are in the project file, they should be in the checked out code. How does anyone compile it since v8.h is in an ‘external’ directory and no ‘special’ include folders are specified for the project “Port”. I have tried putting the correct directories in the include paths and the error is replaced by a few less understandable errors, so I undid my changes. I see some prebuild.bat files, and have made them run prebuild (even though prebuild events are also should be in the checked out project file). How are people building this? By excluding problem non-critical projects?
Your help would be greatly appreciated as I feel I could learn and improve my skills greatly by stepping through the code.
@Stan
I got that error too. I think it is an anomaly. I did two things:
– Exit and restart VS 2005
– Update the source with the gclient
I don’t know which of these fixed it though!
Tim
Thanks for the quick response Tim.
I seem to have got it to work; I’m still not sure how but it may be that for some reason I didn’t have all the files in the repo. I can compile the project from C:chromiumtrunkreleasesrcchrome (after running gclient sync from the release folder and downloading all the files into releasesrc) but not from C:chromiumtrunksrcchrome – does that maybe tell anyone what I did wrong? Anyways, I’m sure I did something wrong in the beginning and that’s why it didn’t work.
Good luck y’all!
P.S Perhaps the tar ball that I originally used was messing something up, can’t see how…
Just out of curiosity, does the user agent string reflect that it is Chromium instead of Chrome?
Just google up user agent string and you should be able to find what it is of course.
@Mischa Kroon: As far as I can tell, Google is no longer open sourcing Chrome. Instead, Google is using the open source development model and the browser is being developed out in the open, which is why the version number is newer than the released version. Also, since more people can see the code, security issues can be fixed quicker than if only one group of people has access to it. Security issues should theoretically be fixed faster in an open source browser than a closed sourced one.
Requiring open source developers to use Visual Studio 2005 is not really encouraging. I doubt most developers own a licensed copy of VS2005.
I know what you mean, but Visual Studio is the primary dev. tool for Windows and it seems the right choice to me; there are free versions though I gather it is tricky to get Chrome to compile in VC Express.
Tim