Chrome hits iPhone and iPad, storms to top of download chart Google's new Chrome browser for iOS has stormed the iTunes download charts - hitting the top spot for free apps worldwide. Announced at a dev meeting yesterday, the mobile browser was quietly released in Apple's App Store on 26 June. It is not significantly faster than Safari, the Jesus phone's native browser, but Google's …
It's a skin on top of UIWebView like all other browsers on the app store.
Google was not going to get an exception to the rules, especially after their Safari tracking shenanigans.
It's just a safari skin. Apple don't allow anything other than Safari. I'm sure Google would love to have all Apple owners using a Google browser...
Worse still, it uses the browser control, not full Safari, so it can't even use Javascript JIT Nitro, so it's 5x slower than Safari (which isn't exactly a speed deamon).
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/the-problem-with-chrome-for-ios
Safari Mobile on iOS Sunspider: 1784ms
Chrome on iOS: 6917ms
(lower is better) OUCH.
Still, Apple fanboys don't care about shit like that. if someone kicks the ball in motion, they will run with whatever like lemmings.
@Barry Shitpeas: "Still, Apple fanboys don't care about shit like that. if someone kicks the ball in motion, they will run with whatever like lemmings."
Hilarious - the relatively small proportion of Apple users is so often compared to sheep running with the herd, and usually by the people in the larger groups. It's even funnier when it's a Windows user targeting a Mac user ("stop being a sheep and rejoin the other 90%!").
How else would you explain that a Safari browser, that's significantly slower than Safari, but called Chrome "jumps to the top of the charts"? Because they are braindead sheep is why.....
The same reason these braindead show only use what they know. It's how they ended up with crappy i-things in the first place,. they were too stupid, or too lazy to explore anywhere than they shiny shop on Regent St.
>They introduce the all new Safari, who would want chrome on an Apple device anyway?
Anyone who thinks Safari on iOS is a regrettable, crash-prone, oft-misrendering mess. It's tolerable on a mac but wrong here.
Seriously I just took Chrome out for a spin on google groups/usenet. Safari is dog slow and always misformats it. Chrome? Perfect. Word & text selection has been getting worse on safari, works here. Open in new tab& switch to it. Not in background & then you have to select windows like safaris recent step backwards. Tabs! Real tabs!
But hey if you are too much of a fanboi to appreciate browser choice & competition to spur Safari on your platform of choice that just goes to show why people love to bait fanbois.
"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold."
Yes, I realise that Google is not providing this solely for my benefit but I don't value what they are taking and am pretty confident I won't come to any great harm so the deal works for me.
Should I be more timid? How much sky is going to fall on my head?
"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold"
Is that so ? Someone better tell the Linux community that then, cos the last I checked, Linux did not require payment. It doesn't always equate that because you are not paying for something, that you then become the product being sold.
The thing is, Google have always been very open about what they do with your data. You kind of know where you stand. You say 'unspeakably evil' but in actual fact they are going to use some internal systems to target ads at you. Whoop.
Facebook, which arguably holds way more intimate and personal data, has never been open about it. They 'own' you, in many senses of the word, and they WILL sell you to the highest bidder. Yet nobody seems to give a crap.
I will happily ignore chrome for a long time (forever) while I somehow paid for it.
Ignore the pre installed browsers as long as you can since they are coded without competition in mind, without ambitious developers. Why bother if they will have your application installed anyway? That is how opera, Firefox guys do crazy things to support both Android 2.x and 4.x because they want to be chosen by end user/ enterprise.
Writing this in chrome on a 4S... I've got 26 tabs open, seems quite happy.
It's not as slick as Safari in terms of feedback speed (zooming is a bit clunky, but not offensive). I do low that it remembers my username entry (as a dictionary word) for el reg, whereas safari doesn't - handy when you have my big ass email addy.
Also love the unified chrome search & address bar is carried across well - and not having to scroll up to the top of the damned page to see the address bar, which drives me crazy in safari.
Apple may be famous for enorcing UI conventions but when it's their bad choices they can't see the wood for the egos.
"not having to scroll up to the top of the damned page to see the address bar, which drives me crazy in safari."
Agreed this is annoying.
Sorry to state the bleedin' obvious, if you already know this. But a double-tap on the black bar at the top of the screen, automatically scrolls to the top.
You're not missing anything. I just ripped it off my ICS phone as it's not as good as the stock Android browser.
Too many pregant pauses in operation, very laggy at screen reorientation, no way I could find to get the bar to autohide like the stock app so that the page being viewed occupies the whole screen.
All in all, I reckon it's a WIP and probably needs another major release or two to become a candidate for being the default browser on Android. Good work for a first attempt though, I have to give it that.
Install both opera mobile and new Firefox, both can sit in sd card. Firefox guys also promise an arm6 release once things settle.
They are both way better than google chrome. They can't even release it for Android 2.x. Funny thing, people don't think about possible Android 5 only updates. They happily ignored 80% of their own market you know.
Says Google and gives you only a choice of enabling cookies for all the world (including third-party cookies) or disabling them altogether.
No need anymore for Google to hack around the default setting in Safari (which allowed cookies, but banned third-party cookies, which is the only sane setting when it comes to cookies and privacy).
Apart from that and the fact that you can neither up- nor download files with it, Chrome is nice. It can even sync your passwords over from your desktop, something that OS X, iOS and Safari can't do even after 5 years.
If there's still any doubt if Apple is just coasting along by sheer inertia now, imagine Safari being ported to Android and the world don't giving a shit.
Depends. iWork is nice, but again a total lock-in. Garageband would be tricky on Android (Android just sucks for low-lag, realtime-like audio stuff). But yeah, let them port all of that, I would like it. Also port Facetime and iMessage to Android and Windows. Or accept that in the end everyone just uses Skype and the like instead.
SInce Apple built a load of optimisations into IOS Safari that are not available to 3rd party browser apps, I had given up using 3rd party browswers on my iPad because every single one of them underperforms stock.
So how does a poor performing reskin of the un-optimised Webkit browser API become no. 1 app? Free or not I don't think I'll waste my time. I know before I try it it will be inferior in performance to the optimised IOS Safari.
"So how does a poor performing reskin of the un-optimised Webkit browser API become no. 1 app?"
Simple, because many people will not realise it's a "poor performing reskin of the un-optimised Webkit browser API" until after they have downloaded it, there by, adding to its #1 position in the free charts.
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