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Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

How much is there even left for Chrome to do, once you are building on top of a WKWebView? Seems like Chrome would be a very thin layer on top of it, with WKWebView doing most of the work, and Chrome just implementing a thin layer of user interface widgetry on top of that (next and back button, url bar, etc). Sounds to me like it's just a branded "white label" version of Apple's standard Safari browser.

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> How much is there even left for Chrome to do

Looking at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... there is:

autocomplete, autofill, content settings, content suggestions, crash reporting, desktop promotion, device sharing, dom distiller, favicon, find in page, first run, geolocation, history, infobars, metrics, open from clipboard, passwords, payments, physical web, prefs, reading list, search engines, share extension, signin, ssl, suggestions, sync, translate, voice

Many of the things that I want removed from Chromium / Chrome.

Well now that it's open source you could in theory remove the things you don't want and keep only the good parts. In practice it's not realistic for a single person to do it and even if it was you'd still have to maintain it.

It is indeed.

Chrome on iOS has some neat UI innovations, though-- when you drag down on a page you see three icons; a + sign for a new tab, a refresh icon, and an X to close the current tab. So you can drag straight down to refresh, down then left to add a new tab, etc. I really miss that in safari.

It also syncs history, logins, open tabs, etc, with desktop Chrome.

I am glad they abandoned swipe-to-switch-tabs for swipe-to-go-back like Safari uses. Much more useful IMO

I've always wondered why the Android version does not have swipe to go back.

Android has a system level back button.

Which is not as convenient to use on larger phones, one handed, compared to a gesture that works anywhere on the web page. I have a Honor 8 and while overall I'm very satisfied with the apps, speediness of the phone, the lack of gestures in most Android apps compared to iOS gets old very fast, even more so because 99% of all the good android handsets on the market are much bigger than the iPhone 5s I had before.

Saying you can press the back button located on the bottom left side of the screen really doesn't cut it.

However will you overcome such a grievous inconvenience?!

These three shortcuts are the reason I never use Safari on my iphone.

Bookmark/tab sync, for one. Desktop Chrome users can access tabs/history originating from the iOS client.

Safari bookmarks/tabs sync across iOS/macOS as well. You can also access tabs/history originating from the iOS client.

I'm in the middle of a trial switch to Safari so that I can utilize this, but man, Safari on the desktop is such a pain compared to Chrome that I think I'm going to have to sacrifice the feature.

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