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Making Chrome better on iOS

raphaelcaixeta.com

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Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#21

Post by wavephorm »

jdboyd wrote: post #19
wavephorm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

v8 is not actually much faster I'm not concerned about raw performance. I'm concerned with Apple forceably making iPad 1 (along with all older devices) unnecessarily obsolete by restricting the web browser on the device. A really good example is the iPad 1 is still using an obsolete version of the WebSocket protocol. That means web servers that want to support iPad 1, must run libraries that support an outdated versi…

So, an iPad 1 running the latest iOS still is stuck with an old WebSocket implementation? If correct, that is just astoundingly crappy!

Even iOS5 uses the the hixie-76 draft protocol from 2010.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#22

Post by Greenisus »

kennywinker wrote: post #20
Greenisus wrote: post #17

I like the spirit of this idea, but I don't think the code is complete. I installed Chrome but do not want it to be my default browser. If apps started doing this, I'd just uninstall Chrome. A better choice would be to present a UIActionSheet asking the user which browser to use and then save that preference to the app's Settings bundle with NSUserDefaults.

That sounds much better than just defaulting to chrome if available. That said, this is a bit too much overhead for most developers to actually implement. For instance, you would also need to create a settings bundle, so users can reset this setting if they want. What I'd really like to see is Apple enable this at a system level. FireFox for iOS would be nice to see, and we don't want developers to have to revisit th…

It sounds like a lot of overhead, but it's really quite simple. Objective-C is a bit verbose for a Hacker News comment, so I put it up as a Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/3080870

As for making a Settings bundle, that's pretty easy too and you wouldn't have to do it unless you wanted an easy way to let someone change their preference later.

Besides all that, I think everyone agrees with you that Apple should make it possible to do it at a system level. The simplest way to do this in my opinion would be to allow users to remove pre-installed apps if there is an alternative on the device. For instance, if I have an app that responds to "http:// URLs, allow Safari to be removed.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#23

Post by igrigorik »

travisjeffery wrote: post #12

> Google Chrome is nothing more than a UIWebView skin on iOS Mobile Chrome's networking stack is the same as Desktop Chrome, providing SPDY, prefetching, etc.

"Chrome for iOS has some pretty major technical restrictions imposed by the App Store, such as the requirement to use the built-in UIWebView for rendering, no V8, and a single-process model. As a result it’s been challenging to re-use critical Chromium infrastructure components.

That said, there is a lot of code we do leverage, such as the network layer, the sync and bookmarks infrastructure, omnibox, metrics and crash reporting, and a growing portion of content."

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups#!...

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#24

Post by bwilliams18 »

Greenisus wrote: post #22
kennywinker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds much better than just defaulting to chrome if available. That said, this is a bit too much overhead for most developers to actually implement. For instance, you would also need to create a settings bundle, so users can reset this setting if they want. What I'd really like to see is Apple enable this at a system level. FireFox for iOS would be nice to see, and we don't want developers to have to revisit th…

It sounds like a lot of overhead, but it's really quite simple. Objective-C is a bit verbose for a Hacker News comment, so I put it up as a Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/3080870 As for making a Settings bundle, that's pretty easy too and you wouldn't have to do it unless you wanted an easy way to let someone change their preference later. Besides all that, I think everyone agrees with you that Apple should mak…

Along with that allow chrome to run its own game-not require it to use the underlying web rendering thing.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#25

Post by mtgx »

vitno wrote: post #2

what chrome on iOS really needs is access to the JIT. Till then, it will be much slower than safari...

That's a bit of a stretch. You shouldn't notice that much of a performance difference unless you go to the desktop version of Gizmodo or BusinessInsider. Fortunately they already have mobile versions (at least Gizmodo does).

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#26

Post by kennywinker »

Greenisus wrote: post #22
kennywinker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds much better than just defaulting to chrome if available. That said, this is a bit too much overhead for most developers to actually implement. For instance, you would also need to create a settings bundle, so users can reset this setting if they want. What I'd really like to see is Apple enable this at a system level. FireFox for iOS would be nice to see, and we don't want developers to have to revisit th…

It sounds like a lot of overhead, but it's really quite simple. Objective-C is a bit verbose for a Hacker News comment, so I put it up as a Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/3080870 As for making a Settings bundle, that's pretty easy too and you wouldn't have to do it unless you wanted an easy way to let someone change their preference later. Besides all that, I think everyone agrees with you that Apple should mak…

I guess my point was, without a settings option to re-set this, it's an incomplete feature. It works for a very narrow scenario, but not for the vast diversity of scenarios that the real world will bring. For instance, your code has a fairly large bug... if the user sets chrome as the default, then at some later point they delete chrome, it won't open urls anymore.

I would definitely encourage you to polish up that gist into some kind of easily incorporated module (a category on UIApplication, perhaps?)... the more people who start doing this sort of thing, the more pressure there will be on Apple to enable this the "right" way.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#27

Post by delackner »

Why not take this idea in a more comprehensive direction: a donation supported site with API to register your app as consuming specific mime-types, so any compliant app wanting a producer of emails for instance, could grab a list from this site and then ask the user which they prefer, out of those apps they have installed (since those apps would all phone home to the server and say "user foo@bar.com has installed app Y on device with MAC ID M".

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#28

Post by ricardobeat »

crazygringo wrote: post #13
ricardobeat wrote: post #10

I have Chrome installed but don't want it as a default, this would just annoy the hell out of me.

Curious, why? You don't really need more than one browser on your phone. If you installed Chrome and haven't deleted it, one can assume it's because the person prefers Chrome. Otherwise you can just delete it after having tried it out. Or am I missing something? It can't really even be for testing, since on iOS it's not like it's possible for Chrome to render any differently than in Safari!

My iPad has lots of rarely-used apps in it, as do most of my friends'. I haven't used Chrome enough to decide if I want to keep it or not, the mere fact that it exists shouldn't indicate preference.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#29

Post by statictype »

igrigorik wrote: post #23
travisjeffery wrote: post #12

> Google Chrome is nothing more than a UIWebView skin on iOS Mobile Chrome's networking stack is the same as Desktop Chrome, providing SPDY, prefetching, etc.

"Chrome for iOS has some pretty major technical restrictions imposed by the App Store, such as the requirement to use the built-in UIWebView for rendering, no V8, and a single-process model. As a result it’s been challenging to re-use critical Chromium infrastructure components. That said, there is a lot of code we do leverage, such as the network layer, the sync and bookmarks infrastructure, omnibox, metrics and cra…

Just wanted to say, great job on the Chrome app.

Only 2 things I don't like about it:

1) Getting at bookmarks requires too many clicks.

2) Sometimes my bookmarks get rearranged on the desktop after I use them in iOS.

Otherwise, great job. Syncing my browser history/bookmarks/passwords is great. And it feels more snappy than Safari, which I didn't think was even technically possible.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#30

Post by nicw »

delackner wrote: post #27

Why not take this idea in a more comprehensive direction: a donation supported site with API to register your app as consuming specific mime-types, so any compliant app wanting a producer of emails for instance, could grab a list from this site and then ask the user which they prefer, out of those apps they have installed (since those apps would all phone home to the server and say "user foo@bar.com has installed app…

This is a start: http://handleopenurl.com/scheme/ Register your URL scheme there to avoid collisions and help garner support from those who want to support your app.
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