Chrome Beta channel for phones and tablets on Android 4.0+ | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Beta channel for phones and tablets on Android 4.0+

chrome.blogspot.com

61 pointsarrowgunz28 comments

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.

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...

It's still silly, though.

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?

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.

> - 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 [...]

Is this the reason why some HN comments are displayed using a smaller font than the rest of them? I always thought it had something to do with their score..

EDIT:

> - The edges of the screen are still wasted on the useless unsymmetric tab switching gestures.

Tab switching seems to be affected by your phone case.. when I removed mine from S3 it worked perfectly, but with it I can never reliably switch tabs.

Yes, that's the reason. From what I can tell a sub-0 score (and thus low contrast) would be one reason why Chrome would shrink the text. But that's fine. The real killer is the heuristic that heavily shrinks divs that only contain a couple of sentences of text. Annoying on HN. Even worse on some other sites, where useless help text gets blown up to a huge size, while the login controls are shrunk to near-invisibility.

The tab switching is completely reliable on a Nexus 4. It used to be almost impossible to get to work on a Nexus S. My issue with it is that tab switching is simply not an important operation on a mobile browser, and having it completely take over the most valuable real estate (the edges) of a phone is silly. The proper Android browser had an option to get these incredibly convenient quick controls from the edges, which could be used also for operations like accessing bookmarks or reloading the page.

On the other hand the fantastic tab switching is the killer feature of Android Chrome for me and the reason I use it over the many other options.

> - The edges of the screen are still wasted on the useless unsymmetric tab switching gestures.

No idea, if it's the same case for you, but I've had trouble with it being unsymetric (edge in from the right works but not the left) and later realized this is caused by Smart Statusbar, and not a bug of Chrome itself.

You're missing the most obvious point: it's slow and jerky as hell. Almost unusable compared to the Android stock browser.

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

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.

You can get webglhttp://blog.tojicode.com/2013/01/get-webgl-working-on-androi...

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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%.

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.

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)

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

http://gigaom.com/2012/10/22/intel-v-arm-the-chromebook-perf...

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.

If you follow the issue tracker the octane boost they've chosen is the exception rather than the rule. Other benchmarking tools indicate worse performance.

Having just ran browsermark on both browsers, new chrome got ~100 pts better.

Looks like I'll stick to stock (AOSP) browser then. I'm not going to call the Galaxy Nexus a resource-constrained device but putting Chrome on it sure makes it feel like one, and I like my device as snappy as they come.

I would use it, but I consider it depricated at this point. I don't want to get my hopes up using the AOSP browser to face the crushing reality that is chrome.

Have you tried Firefox? It's pretty darn fast on my Galaxy Nexus.

Last time I tried it my main complaint was startup-time. The stock browser started instantly, while Firefox has a annoying 3-4 second delay before it started loading things.

Has that improved significantly lately?

I don't remember that ever happening. How long ago did you try it? Comparing the two now, Firefox seems on par with Browser for app startup and slightly quicker to display pages.

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