Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
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Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
#2All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead.
Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
#3Maybe they learned from Microsoft that is not good to ship a browser with an OS?
Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
#4All 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.
Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
#5Browser is still in AOSP, https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Brow...
Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
#6This seems a bit odd to me. The browser is still in the AOSP source (platform/packages/apps/Browser) and has 4.4_r1.2 tags. It was also included in a self-built rom for my Nexus 4 without doing anything to explicitly include it.
Even if google doesn't ship a browser in the source they provide to OEM's, the source for the AOSP browser is still readily available and trivial to add to the build.
Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
#7All 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.
The latter is still fine as the Android team is apparently working on a way of updating the webview without upgrading the device OS. So even the halfbaked browsers can still benefit from speed and security improvements
Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
#8All 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.
that part of the comment was nonsense. they can compile the stock browser just fine.
i bet all that means is that they removed dependency on the stock browser from the base system. which is welcome for barebones images that want only one browser that is not the stock one.
Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
#9Maybe 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.
Re: Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome
#10Are the additional terms for licensing Chrome beyond what was already needed for OEMs to get the Play Store? Unless there are and they're onerous in particularly new way, this feels like a non-issue getting attention because the business agreements around Android are relatively public compared to other OSes.