Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Chrome Beta for Android, first impressions

So Google published a beta of Chrome for Android.  It's only available for Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich", which caused many complaints.  I find this somewhat understandable because Chrome uses fancy graphics, e.g. for the interface of changing between multiple tabs.  What I have a harder time understanding is why they restricted it to a handful of countries in Android Market.  Fortunately the comments on a Google+ post contain hints on how this can be circumvented - thanks, +AJ Stang!
First impressions from using this for a few minutes on a Nexus S: The multiple-tabs feature seems very powerful, and the UI for changing between them seems to work really well on a small mobile device.  Being able to use the Chrome development tools (profiler, DOM inspector etc.) over USB is also quite cool.  It does seem a little slower than the standard Web browser in Android though.  As a heroic experiment on myself I'm making this my default browser for now.

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