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Making Chrome better on iOS

raphaelcaixeta.com

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Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#31

Post by superasn »

saurik wrote: post #8
wavephorm wrote: post #3

Is Chrome for iOS open source? Would there be a way to add V8 back in and release it on Cydia? That may extend the lifespan of Apple products indefinitely. My iPad 1 is already deemed obsolete by Apple and will never receive another web browser update ever, which is obviously retarded. Apple seriously needs to get that giant stick out of their ass.

a) AFAIK, no (as in, it is not open source). b) The change would not just be to mess with the JavaScript engine: it would require totally replacing out the UIWebView backend they are currently using from Apple and, well, pretty much putting back Chrome. They are not rendering the HTML, Apple's UIWebView class is; it would probably be easier to just attempt to recompile/replace JavaScriptCore system wide to stub into…

> so you may as well just turn on Nitro in Chrome (which is easy to do on a jailbroken device).

I know you may mean that it is easy to implement this but just checking if there already exists something which can do this. I searched Google and Cydia with no results. This definitely can be very very useful to a lot of people, esp hackers.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#32

Post by matt »

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…

What about Google building this into the Chrome app?

When you launch the app for the first time, it could ask "Do you want to open URLs in Chrome by default in Chrome-enabled apps?", and make it possible to change this in Chrome's settings menu.

This setting could then be stored in a UIPasteboard named something like com.google.chrome.default, and apps that want to implement the functionality suggested in the original post would just look in this pasteboard for the current setting.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#33

Post by mark_integerdsv »

Cydia has a tweak to change your default browser. Sorted.

iOS Chrome has greater issues.

Tab management is all whizz bang but very unintuitive.

I have used it for about a day and can it fathom how to email a link to the current page to someone.

Emailing a link to the current page is not a standard use case for desktop but it is typical on mobile.

Further: it's hard to see where to arrest the loading of a page, the progress thermometer 'blue zing' thing is very attractive but it doesnt allow any interaction.

Somehow the load new incognito tab button is nearer my fingers than the load a tab in background button. It's annoying that you'd assume I'm fapping.

I think the guys developing this app need to spend more time using other mobile browsers to get a feel for the knds of things people want to do on mobile... iOS Chrome feels like a desktop experience squeezed into 3.5 inches.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#34

Post by kennywinker »

matt wrote: post #32
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…

What about Google building this into the Chrome app? When you launch the app for the first time, it could ask "Do you want to open URLs in Chrome by default in Chrome-enabled apps?", and make it possible to change this in Chrome's settings menu. This setting could then be stored in a UIPasteboard named something like com.google.chrome.default, and apps that want to implement the functionality suggested in the origina…

Interesting. Are there other examples of this hack being used and not kiboshed by Apple?

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#35

Post by matt »

kennywinker wrote: post #34
matt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Google building this into the Chrome app? When you launch the app for the first time, it could ask "Do you want to open URLs in Chrome by default in Chrome-enabled apps?", and make it possible to change this in Chrome's settings menu. This setting could then be stored in a UIPasteboard named something like com.google.chrome.default, and apps that want to implement the functionality suggested in the origina…

Interesting. Are there other examples of this hack being used and not kiboshed by Apple?

According to Apple's documentation, "The UIPasteboard class enables an application to share data within the application or with another application using system-wide or application-specific pasteboards." http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/UIKit/...

For a couple examples: OpenUDID and SecureUDID use UIPasteboard.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#36

Post by saurik »

superasn wrote: post #31
saurik wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) AFAIK, no (as in, it is not open source). b) The change would not just be to mess with the JavaScript engine: it would require totally replacing out the UIWebView backend they are currently using from Apple and, well, pretty much putting back Chrome. They are not rendering the HTML, Apple's UIWebView class is; it would probably be easier to just attempt to recompile/replace JavaScriptCore system wide to stub into…

> so you may as well just turn on Nitro in Chrome (which is easy to do on a jailbroken device). I know you may mean that it is easy to implement this but just checking if there already exists something which can do this. I searched Google and Cydia with no results. This definitely can be very very useful to a lot of people, esp hackers.

I believe it is just a matter of adding the "dynamic-codesigning" entitlement. I started typing up instructions for how to do it with a few shell commands, but then I ran into a limitation with my ancient version of codesign_allocate that caused me to fail. :( You should definitely be able to do it from a Mac fairly easily, however.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#37

Post by elithrar »

mark_integerdsv wrote: post #33

Cydia has a tweak to change your default browser. Sorted. iOS Chrome has greater issues. Tab management is all whizz bang but very unintuitive. I have used it for about a day and can it fathom how to email a link to the current page to someone. Emailing a link to the current page is not a standard use case for desktop but it is typical on mobile. Further: it's hard to see where to arrest the loading of a page, the pr…

In order to email the current page, or stop a page from loading, hit the menu button to the right of the omnibar.

Email will be the 5th text row down.

Note that I do not think it is a side effect of desktop to mobile, but instead their attempt to maximise the content area.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#38

Post by js4all »

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…

Yes, great job. Besides the fast networking part it also feels snappy because of the page snapshot feature. It is also a cool feedback to see reduced colors, when the content has not refreshed yet.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#39

Post by clarky07 »

While this is an interesting idea, it is pretty useless in practice, IMO. Email is by far the app I (and I assume most others) am going to be clicking the most links from, and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Apple won't be changing their links to go to chrome.

If you use something like the gmail app, they (if they don't already) should probably be doing something like this.

Re: Making Chrome better on iOS

#40

Post by Greenisus »

kennywinker wrote: post #26
Greenisus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Polishing it up as a category is a good idea; I might do that tomorrow. But yeah, the point of all this is that you can't set a default browser in iOS.
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