

Chrome Beta channel for phones and tablets on Android 4.0+ - arrowgunz
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/01/our-newest-beta-for-android-phones-and.html

======
jsnell
I can't properly express how disappointed I am by this release. Chrome on
mobile has been a redheaded stepchild for almost a year, with the vague
promise that big improvements would be coming once they merged with mainline
Chrome. But this new beta version seems to solve absolutely none of the issues
that Chrome on Android has been suffering from:

\- Password sync is still not supported. This is absolutely insane, especially
since it's apparently supported by iOS. Typing secure password on a touch
keyboard is a total pain, and even more so to do it again for every single
device.

\- The much touted smart resizing of text is still completely broken. It still
semi-randomly decides that particular bits of text on a page are unimportant
(e.g. due to the paragraph being small) and resize them to an unreadable size.
Often these elements are actually the most important ones on a page.

\- The "zoom + double tap resize text" idiom from just about all other Android
browsers (including the original default browser) is still not there, which
increases the pain caused by the stupid text resizing algorithms.

\- The edges of the screen are still wasted on the useless unsymmetric tab
switching gestures. Ok, unlike the other things, I didn't seriously expect
that this would change. Still a bummer :-(

I can't believe Google removed the real browser from Android 4.2 if they're
really going to leave Chrome as a cute toy with nothing going for it but a
couple of easily demoable features.

~~~
CrazedGeek
Google didn't actually remove the stock browser from 4.2, they just removed it
from the Nexus devices. Like Calendar and Music, it's still in AOSP:
[https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Brow...](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Browser/+/jb-
mr1-release)

It's still silly, though.

~~~
polshaw
More specifically, it's just the nexus 4 (and 10?).

Does this mean that HTML apps (phonegap etc) will use the chrome engine on the
nexus 4?

~~~
ephemient
Browser's gone from the stock image on the Nexus 4, 7, and 10.

android.webkit.WebView is still the same Android WebKit engine that Browser
used (whether it's installed or not); Chrome brings along its own WebKit port.

------
simonsarris
OH THANK GOD it looks like document.elementFromPoint finally works.

For that matter it looks like clientX and clientY are no longer completely
broken if the user, you know, _scrolls the page at all._

I love Chrome to death but this has been an issue since at least March in
Chrome Mobile.

It's still broken in Chrome Mobile plain, which hasn't been updated since
November, but at least its fixed in this Beta.

<https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117754>

<https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=141840>

------
AshleysBrain
At last, an update from Chrome 18 for mobile... but no word on HTML5 features
that the desktop version has like Web Audio API and WebGL. Looks like they're
still not supported here.

~~~
patrickaljord
You can get webgl[http://blog.tojicode.com/2013/01/get-webgl-working-on-
androi...](http://blog.tojicode.com/2013/01/get-webgl-working-on-android-
chrome-beta.html?spref=tw&m=1)

------
mirsadm
Unfortunately I still find it to be quite slow compared to Opera on my Optimus
2x. The difference is speed is quite large.

~~~
Kiro
It's also very slow and jerky compared to the stock browser on Samsung Galaxy
S3.

------
LukaD
I tested the webpage <http://m.chromeexperiments.com/> with chrome and chrome
beta on both my Galaxy Nexus and my Nexus 7. On both devices the new beta
feels a lot slower and the Nexus 7 I can't even scroll the index page smoothly
using the new version.

------
Achshar
Looks like they are finally following through on the promise of aligning the
desktop and android versions. But i wonder does it have same html5 support as
desktop as well or just a version bump with regular improvements.

------
bookwormAT
How does Dolphin (with Dolphin Jetpack) compare to this version. I remember a
post in HN a few weeks back where Dolphin was winning in most benchmarks over
Chrome back then.

Anyone using Dolphin?

------
mtgx
I hope they didn't jump from version 18 all the way to 25 just for naming
sake, while keeping it just as slow as before, and that they actually brought
all the performance improvements desktop Chrome got between versions 18 and
25.

~~~
teraflop
Did you read the article? Paragraph 3:

> Chrome for Android now benefits from all the speed, security and other
> improvements that have been landing on Chrome’s other platforms. For
> example, in today’s Beta update we have improved the Octane performance
> benchmark on average by 25-30%.

~~~
mtgx
I did. But I don't buy it yet. I'll be waiting for benchmarks, whenever this
version is stable, and someone tests the latest devices with it. I've been
outraged with Chrome for Android ever since it made Samsung's dual core 1.7
Ghz Cortex A15 look slower than Apple's dual core 1.4 Ghz Swift chip, even
though it's significantly higher in both clock speed and IPC performance. But
Chrome still managed to make it perform more poorly in the browser benchmarks,
and a _lot_ more poorly than the ARM Chromebook that is using the exact same
chip as Nexus 10.

~~~
teraflop
Fair enough. For what it's worth, that Octane benchmark went from 1217 to 1678
on my Nexus 4. (38% improvement, measured using a median of 3 runs for each
browser version)

~~~
mtgx
It scored 3400 on the Chromebook a couple of months ago:

[http://gigaom.com/2012/10/22/intel-v-arm-the-chromebook-
perf...](http://gigaom.com/2012/10/22/intel-v-arm-the-chromebook-performance-
battle/)

The dual core 1.7 Ghz A15 may be faster than your quad core 1.5 Ghz Krait, but
it still seems like a lot of it still depends on software, which I'd attribute
in large part to Chrome itself, and perhaps in small part to the Nexus 4
drivers and Android itself.

Also, is it me or does Octane seem pretty single-threaded? Quad cores don't
seem to have much of an impact over dual cores.

