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Comment by bri3d | Hacker News Reader

Chrome for iOS doesn't use V8 or the Chromium fork of WebKit, just UIWebView. [0] Because it's using WebViews, it's about 3x slower than the OS's Safari browser [1], because WebViews in sandboxed apps don't get the "Nitro" JavaScript JIT from iOS 5 onwards (presumably for mark-executable security reasons).

Unless the tab-sharing feature is crucial to more people than I thought, I don't think this app is going to be a runaway hit.

0: https://twitter.com/viviancromwell/status/218402587760795648 1: https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/21843446275153920...

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Only JS execution is 3x slower -- everything else (DOM, layout, repaint, parsing) is the same.

Most web pages (and even web applications) are rarely bottlenecked by JS execution speed. (There are a few exceptions to this rule...for example, the JS GameBoy Color emulator probably won't work very well)

You mean the same as Mobile Safari, not the same as Chrome, right? Because "repaint" is not part of WebKit proper (it's implemented separately in Chrome and Safari, for example). And even "layout" is different code on iOS and in other WebKit ports...

Yes, that's right: I'm comparing CriOS to Mobile Safari, not to Chrome for Android or PC/Mac.

That's an interesting point about layout. I hadn't even considered how font size adjustment and such comes into play.

feature is crucial

A crucial feature for me would be password-manager support (lastpass, 1passwd). The (lack of) password management on the iPad is driving me nuts. The half-baked external apps that let you copy/paste don't cut it for me. Nor the awfully slow and constantly crashing "LastPass browser".

Does Chrome finally bring relief?

Hmm... I never thought of that.

Safari 6 added a new preferences panel for saved passwords. Unfortunately there's not an equivalent iPad setting (just checked on iPad 2, iOS 6 beta 1), but this might change between now and fall...

Maybe you should file a bug report?

I didn't have much success with the bugs that I filed at apple over the past years. They all went into a black hole, never received as much as a response.

The thing is that I don't want the iPad to just save passwords. It already does that, although somewhat unreliably for me. I want it to use my existing, ginormous list of passwords stored in LastPass.

I don't even try anymore to do anything that requires a login on the iPad, it's an exercise in frustration. Sometimes Safari remembers the password that I painfully transcribed for a site, usually it doesn't.

It's such a blatant oversight for a device that is touted no least as "the internet in your hands" that I keep wondering why I so rarely see other people mention it.

It's such a blatant oversight for a device that is touted no least as "the internet in your hands" that I keep wondering why I so rarely see other people mention it.

I was with you up until this last sentence. People who know what LastPass is (let alone use it) are in a tiny minority.

Given how they treat the development community (hello Xcode nightmare), which I'd wager is a much larger group, I don't think it's entirely surprising that something like password manager support would be further down in the list of priorities.

Chrome Sync allows you to sync passwords.

Agreed. 1Password support would be the thing that would cause me to use Chrome exclusively on iOS. The machinations I have to go through now with 1Password on iOS are extremely frustrating.

I have the same problem and found a solution, maybe it helps for you.

1password supports Dropbox integration, and it provides a web page inside your dropbox account (i.e. password protected) that you can log into with your master password to check them out.

It is not automatic nor integrated, and it does not allow you to add new passwords, but at least you can easily copy and paste them on the iPad.

Only for Javascript stuff, though. If you're browsing mobile sites, it shouldn't affect you at all, as well as most websites on the web that aren't JS-heavy.

Well that's a bummer. The UI in the Chrome app is really slick!

Don't worry too much about that, it's only slower for javascript execution. The other features, including Chrome sync, unlimited tabs, "Request desktop site", more than make up for it.

The real stumbling block, IMO, is that without jailbreaking, links from other apps will always open in Safari.

That is something I really hope Apple fixes.

They have a generic mechanism to send files to other apps, but not for URLs, making it painful to pass a URL to Twitter or an instant messaging app.

Are you not thinking of custom URL schemes, which you can switch to another app and optionally pass small bits of data to it?

I'm not sure what happens when multiple apps register for the same scheme.

I'm looking for a generic mechanism to let the user choose an app and pass an 'http' url to that app. I don't think I can do that with custom schemes, because each app would have its own scheme.

It could be accomplished via a custom file type if everybody standardized on it (say via a .url file of type text/x-url or maybe even text/plain). But I was hoping for something official.

The current way people do this is via the pasteboard, but the switching and pasting process feels awkward to me. I suppose that may be the best solution for now. Maybe apps should just handle things better if they're awoken with a new URL on the pasteboard (i.e. offer to take an action with it).

I'll think through my use cases some more.

The first app or the last app (can't remember which) that registered for the custom URL scheme owns it.

> Maybe apps should just handle things better if they're awoken with a new URL on the pasteboard (i.e. offer to take an action with it).

This is almost how using custom URL schemes would work, but I think it's still superior to fiddling with the pasteboard though.

But you are right. There isn't a standard way to do it now. Most apps that expose or utilize this form integration has to come up with something themselves. Also see http://handleopenurl.com/

> unlimited tabs

Safari on iOS 6 (on iPad, at least) finally lets you open more than 9 tabs! The new max is 25, which is enough.

Safari on the iPhone in iOS 5 only gets 8. I wonder if Chrome for iOS gets any sort of tab recovery on crashes. It doesn't happened frequently, but it's annoying when I have to quit and relaunch safari for whatever reason and lose everything I had open.

At first glance, the UI feels pretty good. Here's some screenshots of Google Chrome on iOS: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjAhkquN

Couldn't agree more. More like 1.5-2x slower but it certainly isn't a speed improvement over Safari.

Didn't know about Nitro, but this app is a flop because it has to be on top of UIWebView.

Not sure there's any other way to build this app, Google has some bright engineers.

I don't think this app is going to be a runaway hit.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57463546-93/google-chrome-a...