14 DAY TRIAL // The preparations for the 2010 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) are well underway and there are only a few days left for students to sign up for a project. There are plenty of well-known open source projects to choose from, it's a veritable ‘who's who’ list, and one of them is Chromium, the open-source web browser on which Google Chrome is based. The project is now reaching out for students who'd be interested in working on making Chromium, and subsequently Google Chome, a better browser, over the summer.
"The Chromium project has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this awesome program. This means that you have the opportunity to work on exciting new features for Chromium over the summer, experience real-world browser development with a Chromium team mentor, and, of course, receive a stipend," Jeremy Moskovich, software engineer at Google, announced on the Chromium blog. "To participate, first pick an idea off our handy ideas list or come up with your own."
There are several features the Chromium team would like to get some help with, in particular, the Mac build seems to be in need of some attention. One of the areas that the team believes need some work is bidirectional (BiDi) language support in Chromium. It's not the most glamorous of tasks, but it would help greatly with the browser's internationalization effort.
Native Client (NaCL) is another thing being proposed as a possible project for GSoC. Chromium developers would like to see more libraries and applications ported to NaCl to supplement the existing ones like Cairo or QT. The team says several programming or scripting languages have been ported as well, like Ruby and Lua.
Google Chrome and Chromium have always lagged behind on Mac, something that is evident from the number of things that need to be worked on. Developers list four main areas where contributions would be appreciated. If you're interested in working on Chromium for the summer or just curious to see what new features the browser may get in a few months' time, you can check out the GSoC 2010 dedicated page here.