Submitted by So, how long have we been waiting for this to happen? Google has finally unveiled the future if the Android browser: it has no future. Google unveiled Chrome for Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and has designated it as the future default browser for the Android platform.
For reasons beyond my knowledge, the stock Android browser is regarded as not particularly good – I honestly wouldn’t know since it functions just fine on my Galaxy SII. However, with so many consistent complaints about it, I’m guessing I’m just lucky. As such, Google has now released Chrome for Android, in beta form.
It brings lots of cool features from the desktop Chrome to mobile devices, such as the invaluable incognito mode. The browser does promise to solve one thing that really bothers me about the stock Android browser: the silly limit of eight tabs open. There’s no limit on Chrome for Android. The sync feature is also particularly welcome – the pages open in your desktop Chrome will be waiting for you on your phone (in groups; one for each device).
Another major advantage: faster updates. Chrome for Android will be updated every six weeks, which is pretty damn quick for a mobile browser. All this will happen through the Android Market.
Since Adobe had already announced plans to discontinue Flash for mobile anyway, Chrome for Android does not include it. “As we announced last November, Adobe is no longer developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, and thus Chrome for Android Beta does not support Flash content,” Adobe said in a statement, “Flash Player continues to be supported within the current Android browser.”
From here on out, Chrome is going to be the default browser for Android – the big problem here is, though, that barely anyone can actually use this new browser. It’s only available for Ice Cream Sandwich users, meaning about one percent of Android users can actually, you know, use it, which illustrates just how much the update climate sucks in the Android world.
Oh, great! Now how about fixing your horrible platform fragmentation so more than 2% of Android users can take advantage of this update?
Tsss, I understand people complaining about the delay to get security fixes, but this is sounding more and more like whiny ADHD kids unable to wait more than five seconds before getting their christmas gifts. You know hat whining will get you? Google holding on updates even more. After all, that is what Apple is doing: iOS 6 is already done, but nobody knows it, thus nobody whines about it. Then only developpers will have it, and nobody will whine either.
Because these “nobodies” are not forced to wait a half of year after the official release to update their devices.
And most of this difference is only du to when they make it “official”. iOS6 is already done, why don’t you ask for it? Oh, right, it is not “”official””.
You do realize that iPhone 3GS users got the latest iOS 5 update on the day it was released and we’re talking about a phone that’s 2.5 years old. You do realize that, right?
It’s also a phone which is actively promoted and pushed on new owners…
(which probably also means that a period of support from the end of mass sales is becoming more relevant now)
The 3GS is a current model (despite being grossly overpriced and well and truly outdated). That is why it is still supported.
You do realize Google, Samsung, HTC, Motorola etc. are not the same Company, you do realize that, right?
Yet the original iPhone and 3G is not, Apple can barely be bothered to support 3 handsets.
Look at how many Android devices get updates per manufacturer, its between a handful and a dozen…
Apple didn’t put iOS 5 on the older iPhones because they simply cannot cope with the hardware requirements (even 3GS is really pushing it in the terms of perfomance – I remember my 3GS ran noticeably faster on iOS 3 and 4)
Meanwhile, practically all Android handsets released in just the last year should run ICS without a problem, and yet even now, 3 months after ICS was released, not even 2% of devices run it.
Why? Because it is not in the best interest of the carriers to do so. In a no-holds-barred attempt to conquer the market, Google handed over the reigns to carriers which now exploit their users. Come on, I owned a Sony Ericsson Android phone for which support was dropped only 6 months after release (only received one OS upgrade).
Apple and Microsoft got their shit together regarding OS update process. Android is a joke.
Meanwhile, you jump on momentary ICS adoption as if it were indicative of how many of those “last year” devices will get it …the logical connection you make here seems quite tenuous (especially vs. how the relatively decentralised Android just has different type of unveiling schedule)
I wonder how you will see iOS dropping 3S support, which should happen within a year, likely just a few months after its active promotion and last large scale sales.
And come on, viewing Android through the perspective of Sony Ericsson, an entity which struggles, has internal development issues, smallish slice of the pie, & is in the red for quite some time?
Eh, well, if this only works under ice cream sandwich, considering that it took my last phone (Droid Incredible) about 9 months just to get gingerbread, a lot of these people are going to be waiting a long time, and some of them will be waiting until they get their next phone.
However, now I’m rocking a Galaxy Nexus, so I’m good
Fragmentations is not necessarily bad. It means that while Android has thousand of engineers around the world working with the free Open Source Community. Apple on the other hand is an anachronic dictatorship who don’t trust not even their shadow.
Still Webkit, Darwin, Clang, LLVM and other open-source projects are done or actively supported by Apple.
Still they also(!) provide examples of that “dictatorship” thing …early Webkit behind closed door & its unmergeable code dumps, similar with Darwin ( (edit: direct Archive.org link of http://www.opendarwin.org/en/news/shutdown.html works weird on OSnews…) “has not panned out. Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources”); and wasn’t involvement in Clang and LLVM spooled up also because Apple didn’t like publishing all their changes to GCC?
Edited 2012-02-15 23:15 UTC
Or how about installing CyanogenMod version 9 and stop bitching? You will have the best ICS implementation available and you can use Chrome.
For me, this is certainly a “rub-it-in-your-nose” kind of announcement from Google. I have an HTC Inspire 4G that came with Gingerbread. Due to the Sense UI, there is little chance that this phone will ever get updated to ICS. It is a quite capable phone. The way Android OEM’s get to treat their end-users is very frustrating. I may have to wander over to the “modders” world, but I’m a little leary of what AT&T might think of this (they are notoriously nasty about some of this from what I hear), as well as the prospect of bricking my phone. Poo!
Sense is really a shame. I have had to return my Evo 3D under warranty and got a Nexus S from my carrier as a replacement phone. The vanilla Android UI is so much better than Sense (less clutter, less dumb visual stuff, les useless crap apps)… My next phone will be one of the Nexus serie.
Chrome for Android essentially also brings Chrome OS (since that’s hardly more than a browser…) for Android.
I guess it makes the future of Chrome OS clearer, in case anybody still wondered. I guess that’s the point of convergence, hinted at from time to time, starting to happen.
Edited 2012-02-08 19:38 UTC
The Android web browser is disliked by web developers more than it’s users. (Remember that to many users IE6 was just fine.) I’ve been written some websites for mobile, and the Android browser consistently have more bugs and problems than the iOS-browser. (Which always struck me as odd, because in desktop Chrome seem to have less bugs than Safari.)
It’s odd that Apple get’s crap for being anti web because of App Store when they have if not the best, at least one of the best mobile browsers.
Considering that Google is a much more web focused company, it’s mobile browser should arguably be much better than Apple’s.
Show me how Android’s browser doesn’t show Web pages please. ’cause most of the bitching about nonâ€iOS browsers tends to be from the poor support for Apple extensions.
This would make investing in Chrome app development much more inviting.
Glad Google did not put some “lite”, downscaled version of Chrome on Android.
Edited 2012-02-08 19:52 UTC
Why on earth is this Chrome release country restricted?
https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=2393…
This sort of balkanization really rubs me the wrong way and I don’t see this mentioned on any news story about the subject.
Luckily it’s a good thing Android is a fairly open OS and you can install whatever you want on it as long as you tick the box stating you take full responsibility if it decides to kill your cat and set fire to your house as a result of all the nefarious code you’ll run (or something). And obviously it didn’t take long for someone to pull the .apk
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/02/07/download-not-on-the-eligibl…
Because it is easier to do a progressive (country-by-country but it could be device-by-device) rollout instead of crashing the servers with downloads and the developpers’mail inbox with bug reports. Ask any popular app developper.
Seriously? Google has probably enough bandwidth to DDoS several whole countries (at the same time) out of web existence…
And their support is marginal, largely user-generated, anyway.
Edited 2012-02-15 23:20 UTC
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9069473/Chrome-for-And…
An even more interesting twist. I really do hope Flash will die soon. Looking forward to W3C stuff replacing this propritary crap eventually.
I would like Flash to die too, but many sites require it. So they should be supporting Flash until a majority of web sites have moved away from it.
Remember, web browsers are about accessing content. They should not be about ideology.
Android browser rendered stuff pretty much the same as chrome … because it was very similar to Chrome.
I see it as a rebadging of the browser than a replacement.
because Chrome is much more standards compliant than Android Browser.
Standard compliant is a bit of a joke in the Web dev world.
how so?
Just one example,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.html
The “Vendor” prefixes is the important discussion.
Web standards are a joke IMHO, it is like the SQL Standard … nobody has the same standard.
Edited 2012-02-11 15:37 UTC
No, this is a genuine port of Chrome to Android. It has multi-proccess architecture and every thing. The android browser shared alot of components with Chrome but it was really a separate code-base.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCdZIHBbRV0
Thanks.
I worked on some basic mobile stuff and for all intents and purposes they were the same.
Browser already has syncing
The only thing new I’ve seen has been no tab limit, no flash and a lot of crashes. It’ll get there but it’s not a revolution by any means.
Wasn’t anybody using Firefox mobile before?
Well not really as that is the worst browser I’v ever seen for Android. I don’t know what they were thinking. Why do browser developers have to severely nueter their mobile versions. It’s the same with Google Chrome, though I now think it is the best browser on the platform, where is the Chrome store, the ability to change from mobile to desktop surfing. That sucks I’m getting all the mobile versions of sites. I have a tablet with 1280 x 800 rez and a quad core processor I think I have the power to run the full version of the site. Please separate the two Google, tablet and phone.
its actually pretty good depending on the version and on your phone. on some its really horribly slow.
it also faster than chrome on android, ironically.
Am I the only one that thinks because this is a beta, you shouldn’t judge it yet? Does it say anywhere that it won’t be available for other Android versions?
Sadly whilst Google say this is available for ICS, they neglect to say that it’s not available for MIPS-based ICS devices.
At least I presume it’s not MIPS compatible. When I try to install it on my Novo 7 Paladin which has a MIPS CPU, Android Market says it’s not compatible with my device. I’m thus guessing it’s the MIPS chip rather than the fact I’m running Android 4.0.1 rather than the latest 4.0.3.
Then again, Google Books claims to be compatible, but that just quits on startup… Serves me right for being a cheap-skate I guess and not spending 4x the amount to get a “real” Android tablet. 😉
What did you expected from MIPS device?
Android is ARM-focused OS with recently added x86 support. MIPS support is provided “as is”.
I’m crying big tears because ICS doesn’t work on my ZX-Spectrum.
Edited 2012-02-09 15:23 UTC
Nobody’s claiming the ZX-Spectrum will run ICS. That’s a facile and idiotic comparison.
The point is that Google say that Chrome for Android runs on ICS. They do not qualify this to say it’s for ARM-based devices only. In fact, there is no mention anywhere within Google’s information on Chrome for Android about CPU compatibility.
The only way to find this out is to visit the Android Market page for Chrome beta on a MIPS-based device, whereupon all you get told is “Your device isn’t compatible with this item”. You cannot discover the nature of that incompatibility. At the very least, Google should indicate what the incompatibility is, even if that is hidden away in small print.
It is only because I have a detailed technical knowledge that I can surmise this is a CPU architecture issue. In this I am in a tiny minority of consumers.
As for your assertion that Android is an ARM-focused OS with recently added support for x86, that’s not really true. Android was designed to be a platform agnostic OS, hence the emphasis on the Dalvik runtime. Additionally I’d like to note that right now whilst consumers can purchase MIPS-based Android devices, they cannot purchase x86 based Android devices.
It requires hardware graphics acceleration, does the chipset provide that?
Yes. My tablet has hardware graphics acceleration. The tablet comes with several 3D games which exploit that feature.
I’m curious though where you’re getting that assertion from. The nearest I can see is a mention on the Chromium blog that Chrome for Android saying â€hardware-accelerated canvas”, but that post doesn’t say that GPU acceleration is a requirement.
It’s funny this news came out now. Over the last week I’ve been following the problems the Sencha developers (who make sencha touch) have been having with Android’s current browser.
This is what they originally posted:
We’ve always treated the browser in Android 3.x as fundamentally broken, and do not plan to officially support it in Touch 2. We are currently working on improving performance in Android 4.0 – the Ice Cream Sandwich release. So far, we have found no acceptable mechanism to achieve fast and flicker-free animations. We have filed a bug with a simplified test case showing poor performance on a variety of mechanisms with the Android bug list.
Today, though, they say that it’s been patched, but they still have some problems. See this post:
http://www.sencha.com/blog/dive-into-dataview-with-sencha-touch-2-b…
So maybe most of these problems will disappear with chrome coming on board.
It still needs some polish but I’m getting less annoyances than with the stock browser. Eg I no longer get blurry text while the page is loading.
The implementation of tab switching is smoother and stylish, although the horizontal swipe gesture takes some time to get used to. You have to swipe inwards from outside the screen, else you’ll just drag the page content around.
As mentioned in another post above it seriously needs some kind of user agent setting to switch between mobile and desktop. Just because there’s a mobile version of a site doesn’t mean I want to use it, more so when more often than not I’d be missing some content and features.
The final nail in the coffin for the bozoic fandroid argument “My phone’s better! It supports Flash!”.
To bad my phone will never see it…oh, unless I get a new phone.
Well after playing with it this last week I have to say it’s defiantly my favorite browser on Android but that isn’t saying much they all pretty much sucked. I know Google Chrome is still in beta but it still needs a lot of work before it’s ready for prime time. I have a question, is there going to be access to the Chrome Store? Will I be able to change from mobile to desktop, I can’t stand using the mobile version of a site when I have enough computing power to use the desktop version. In fact I really hope they stop making a mobile version all together.