Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome

unwiredview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome

#11

Post by freehunter »

chimeracoder wrote: post #4
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #2

All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead.

> All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead. I would love it if OEMs started to do this. Unfortunately, I bet that most OEMs will just license Chrome, and if they decide not to do that, my money's on them creating half-assed proprietary browsers built around WebView before they turn to Firefox. Which is a shame, because Firefox for Android is young, but shows great promise.

Firefox for Android is slower and has more bugs than Chrome for Android, but I use it and love it solely for the add-on support. LastPass on mobile devices sucked until I found you can install the add-on in Firefox and use your normal browser. Adblock is nice for cutting down on mobile data use, too.

Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome

#13

Post by gcb1 »

ville wrote: post #3

Maybe they learned from Microsoft that is not good to ship a browser with an OS?

google is worse than microsoft when it comes to web control.

the only reason for this is so they can decouple the browser from the system, so they can update the browser faster.

or do you think they like that all those pre 4.1 devices (90%+) cant run their tracking-cookie-substitute or whatever?

Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome

#14

Post by darkstalker »

freehunter wrote: post #11
chimeracoder wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead. I would love it if OEMs started to do this. Unfortunately, I bet that most OEMs will just license Chrome, and if they decide not to do that, my money's on them creating half-assed proprietary browsers built around WebView before they turn to Firefox. Which is a shame, because Firefox for Android is young, but shows great promise.

Firefox for Android is slower and has more bugs than Chrome for Android, but I use it and love it solely for the add-on support. LastPass on mobile devices sucked until I found you can install the add-on in Firefox and use your normal browser. Adblock is nice for cutting down on mobile data use, too.

Don't know what are you talking about, Firefox on Android is currently the fastest browser there. Chrome is slower and buggier on every new update.

Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome

#15

Post by UnfalseDesign »

gcb1 wrote: post #13
ville wrote: post #3

Maybe they learned from Microsoft that is not good to ship a browser with an OS?

google is worse than microsoft when it comes to web control. the only reason for this is so they can decouple the browser from the system, so they can update the browser faster. or do you think they like that all those pre 4.1 devices (90%+) cant run their tracking-cookie-substitute or whatever?

Decoupling an app from the OS to update it faster is the reason they pulled the YouTube app from being shipped with iOS.

Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome

#17

Post by Kylekramer »

UnfalseDesign wrote: post #9
ville wrote: post #3

Maybe they learned from Microsoft that is not good to ship a browser with an OS?

If that were the case, wouldn't they also not ship it with Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Calendar, etc.

They don't. OEMs have to license those as well. This is making the browser more like those services on Android, not less.

Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome

#18

Post by _ea1k »

billyjobob wrote: post #16

Chromium is a free software version of Chrome for PCs. Is there an Android version of Chromium? If so, wouldn't OEMs just ship that instead of licensing Chrome?

The browser that is included with Android 4.4's source code is Chromium. This is still available. I'm not really sure what the author is trying to say, but it seems like an inaccurate article to me.

Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome

#19

Post by kllrnohj »

chimeracoder wrote: post #4
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #2

All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead.

> All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead. I would love it if OEMs started to do this. Unfortunately, I bet that most OEMs will just license Chrome, and if they decide not to do that, my money's on them creating half-assed proprietary browsers built around WebView before they turn to Firefox. Which is a shame, because Firefox for Android is young, but shows great promise.

> if they decide not to do that, my money's on them creating half-assed proprietary browsers built around WebView

All of the major OEMs have already done that. They've been shipping their own browsers built on top of webview for years now. The only devices that ever saw Google's/AOSP's Browser were Nexus devices and those running custom ROMs.

Being limited to WebView isn't a problem anyway - that's all the old Browser used. It's "just" a UI on top of WebView. Just like the majority of browsers in the play store are "just" different UIs on top of WebView.

Post reply on HN