"Swipe from the edge to switch tab" is beautiful :)
Introducing Chrome for Android
141–150 of 240 posts
Re: Introducing Chrome for Android
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's currently available in: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil Sundar, SVP of Chrome just said "We are working hard to bring this to more countries and should greatly expand within the next three months."
Why in the world is this restricted? I live in the Netherlands, and I really don't get what's so hard about releasing here. Sure, we're a small market, so not as important, but still... Software is global, man!
Software may be global, but patent licenses for things like codecs aren't.
Re: Introducing Chrome for Android
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, while I'm generally excited about this, I won't be able to use it anytime soon, unfortunately.
Same here, I bought into the Nexus One hype, great phone but without ICS we are left high and dry with an expensive paperweight with regards to something like Chrome on ICS.
There are ICS builds you can install on an N1 if you are willing to repartition your NAND (the stock partition layout can't fit ICS). Look here:
Re: Introducing Chrome for Android
#144For those wondering what the differences between the stock Android ICS browser and Chrome 16 (which this is based on), Chrome has extra features such as:
* WOFF fonts
* Web workers
* drag and drop (not sure if this would work in mobile)
* file API
* IndexedDB
* form validation
* CSS border images
* SVG filters
Source: http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=chrome+16&b2=androi...
Re: Introducing Chrome for Android
#145I never thought I would see the day that a BlackBerry can run Chrome. I still never think so, but I never thought so, too.
Re: Introducing Chrome for Android
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple seems to be able to innovate iOS while providing robust and timely updates for older devices.
I would not call iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G "robust": it was more of a disaster than anything. There are obviously strengths to all sides here, and I don't mean to champion that Google's is best or the only way. But I think it's clear what they're doing, and I'd bet they've weighed all possible options and found this to be the most economically sensible one.
I honestly thought Apple's behaviour with the 3G was shameful. I wouldn't have minded if they hadn't released the update for the 3G, but instead what they effectively did was brick a load of people's phones and then offer poor options for downgrading. It's really not what I expect from a premium brand.
Re: Introducing Chrome for Android
#147With Android 4.0 at 1% market share, it'll be a long time before most people can even try this. http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
This is common Google strategy. They are trying to build the future and pre-ICS devices are not the future. So they get shafted. Google may make unhappy customers this way, but they can move a lot faster than companies like Microsoft, who support everything back two decades or so sometimes.
Hey, watch it there. All WP7 devices support all the updates thus far and for atleast the next year or so.
Re: Introducing Chrome for Android
#148With Android 4.0 at 1% market share, it'll be a long time before most people can even try this. http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
This is common Google strategy. They are trying to build the future and pre-ICS devices are not the future. So they get shafted. Google may make unhappy customers this way, but they can move a lot faster than companies like Microsoft, who support everything back two decades or so sometimes.
But to be fair, everyone gets a cheap phone every two years, so what's 1% today will be 100% in two years. Remember, the G1 is three-ish years old, and it's mostly gone now. The Nexus One was released on January 5, 2010, and so only the earliest of early adopters (with a standard contract) are just now gaining the ability to upgrade.
Two years is a long time, but if IE 6 went away after two years, we wouldn't even remember that it was once a thing :)
Re: Introducing Chrome for Android
#149Decoupling the browser from the OS is one of the best things that could happen for android security going forward. While it won't help people who can't get upgrades to ICS, at least it will solve the future problems of people who get stuck on 4.x while their OS browser slowly becomes more and more exploitable. I have one phone that is still on 2.2 - it is trivially easy to own the phone with a little bit of javascrip…
Decoupling the browser from the OS is one of the best things that could happen for android security going forward. Decoupling everything but the most rudimentary services is the best way forward for both security and user satisfaction. Despite the laser focus on the underlying operating system version by so many, tens of millions of Android users, across makes, models, and carriers, are seeing endless updates of mapp…
If the core services are going to be different then the fragmentation is still a problem for app developers. May be not so much for the end users but I guess the end users don't care as much.
Not everyone will update frequently or would want things to get updated for them without them knowing it. Certainly not the non-techy users. This makes it a pain to account for all different versions of browsers, OS, resolution and other functionality a pain.
Re: Introducing Chrome for Android
#150My initial perception is that all the Chrome features are great, primarily the data syncing with my desktop browsers. But the rendering is flawed; it doesn't render like the standard Android browser, doesn't render like desktop Chrome, and doesn't seem to even render consistent to itself. For example, a few screenshots comparing the standard Browser view of this comment page and the way Chrome beta views it: Browser:…
It's apparently a feature:
"An issue that often pops up for mobile browsers is that text on the website may be too small to read properly. Where the Android Browser employs a text reflow algorithm to clarify the situation, Chrome for Android features a technique which we’ve called Font Boosting. It uses an algorithm to increase font sizes when necessary, aiming to make the text readable regardless of the zoom level."
(from http://peter.sh/2012/02/bringing-google-chrome-to-android)