Google Chrome already No. 1 among free iOS apps

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57463546-93/google-chrome-already-no-1-among-free-ios-apps/

by mtgx • 14 years ago

139 94 14 years ago

news.cnet.com

f0552• 14 years ago

Which is ironic, because it really is just a webkit view, not even running the latest js engine that native Safari has access to. In short, it's not very good, this Chrome.

rryan• 14 years ago

Well, there's more to Chrome than its pure rendering and JS speed you know?

Predictive prefetching makes sure Chrome already has the page data before you finish typing. It can still beat Safari with tricks like this.

Chrome Sync syncs your profile (credentials, tabs, bookmarks, omnibox typing model, etc.) across all your devices.

The user interface for managing tabs is also very slick.

Auto-update is gimped by the app store approval process, but at least you know that the Chrome team takes security very seriously and will take the minimum possible time to patch security flaws.

Those are some things that I would want over Mobile Safari.

togasystems• 14 years ago

Does the iOS version have predictive prefetching?

jorts2• 14 years ago

I totally agree. Everything in iOS Chrome works amazingly well and all of its features feel very natural to me. I primarily use Chrome across my other machines so it's nice to have all of the same information on my phone now.

Samuel_Michon3• 14 years ago

"Predictive prefetching makes sure Chrome already has the page data before you finish typing."

As a website owner, I really hate that 'feature', it really screws up the exit rate in my site stats (I don't run ads on my sites.)

redthrowaway• 14 years ago

>Chrome Sync syncs your profile (credentials, tabs, bookmarks, omnibox typing model, etc.) across all your devices.

This really is a killer feature, but it needs some tweaking. I do not want iChrome to autofill the same urls it does on my laptop. Let the mobile version default to mobile sites, and the desktop version default to full sites.

geofft• 14 years ago

> Auto-update is gimped by the app store approval process, but at least you know that the Chrome team takes security very seriously and will take the minimum possible time to patch security flaws.

But most security flaws are in the renderer, which comes from the OS. The Chrome team has no ability to do security updates for that copy of WebKit.

Frankly, I'm surprised they were willing to brand this wrapper as "Chrome", given that (and the more general issue that it's not the Chrome WebKit and is slower / less featureful / etc.).

falling• 14 years ago

It is pretty good instead, you and all the other people making noise over here since yesterday should try it instead of making assumptions just for the love of bashing iOS.

There is much more to a browser than the rendering engine.

It often feels faster than Safari (no matter how much people complain it being THREE TIMES slower than Safari because it doesn’t have JIT), incognito mode is much better as I don’t have to go to Settings every tim, passwords sync, omnibox.

The only big issue is that you cannot set it as default.

f0552• 14 years ago

I obviously tried it before commenting, but props to you for implying a statistically possible situation of me being a troll. Well I'm not :P

Chrome works slower and that's a fact. Its keyboard is custom, but inferior to Mobile Safari by far. Its syncing options are superior, but all in all you cannot say it's better than Mobile Safari. Unfortunately, you cannot say Mobile Safari is better either... But not being able to set Chrome as default effectively renders it useless.

currywurst• 14 years ago

Amazing stamp of approval of the Chrome brand! I didn't realize that people were so curious about another browser on iOS.

blorenz• 14 years ago

I don't think this is much of a stamp of approval as it is curiosity. I wouldn't read into this as signing-off from Safari but just to see what Chrome offers.

rogerchucker3• 14 years ago

He/she said it's a stamp of approval of the Chrome brand - not the iOS app itself. As a brand, Chrome dwarfs Safari and hence the high curiosity.

superasn3• 14 years ago

Hopefully this will force Apple to maybe think about giving users a choice of setting default web browser as more and more people (like me) write to them complaining about it.

Just like they denied Sparrow of push notifications at first but as more and more users started pestering them about it, they finally had to give in.

kemayo• 14 years ago

Sparrow still doesn't have push notifications.

superasn3• 14 years ago

Oh you're right. A friend of mine showed me that Sparrow has finally got push notifications so I assumed they had given in. Never thought that it was because he is running a jailbroken device. Darn Apple :/

robgough• 14 years ago

  Just like they denied Sparrow of push notifications at first but as more and more users started pestering them about it, they finally had to give in.

As far as I can Google, they didn't give in - and Sparrow ended up having to do it the same way everyone else does... with them in the middle?

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

The issue was Sparrow would have to handle notifications themselves, which would mean every user's Gmail account (user, plaintext password, and mails) streaming through their servers that likely aren't hardened against attackers nearly as well as Google's. Understandably, this is a risk they didn't want to take.

Xuzz3• 14 years ago

Sparrow tried to position it like that, but that was not the real story: it was not Apple "blocking" them, it was that they did not want to put in the effort to setup a real push service, and instead wanted to run all the time on the device (using battery) to maintain an open connection. Which, of course, not having every app doing that is exactly the problem that push notifications, as implemented by Apple, were designed to solve.

thomasjoulin• 14 years ago

Actually they don't want to access your email, so they can't run a push notification service. And Apple Mail.app does the pulling thing, so allowing to change default Internet app or Mail app would not cause a problem : another app pulls, that's it

thelovebug• 14 years ago

Sparrow has never worked on any email account I have tried or own. Hotmail, my gmail, fastmail - nothing. I have never been able to use it.

binaryorganic• 14 years ago

This won't be a win for customers until they can (1) set their preferred browser and (2) work out the security implications of letting apps use Nitro.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

Apple will not do that out of the kindness of their own hearts. Users must complain about it and demand those features. Apple usually listens if the outrage is big enough that it turns into a PR problem for them.

reddit_clone• 14 years ago

Apple does get a free pass from the industry.

Microsoft had been bashed to hell and back for things far less nasty than this.

(What possible reason do they have for not having the same Javascript engine in UIWebview as in Safari?)

jonny_eh2• 14 years ago

You could always do this as a temporary workaround: http://blog.jonabrams.com/post/26099585134/open-in-chrome

JBiserkov• 14 years ago

Simple bookmarklet, straightforward instructions, great job.

biafra• 14 years ago

Doesn't that break https-urls?

I use

javascript:location.protocol='googlechrome'

dewind• 14 years ago

Does the Chrome browser use its own V8 JavaScript engine and WebKit? Or is it sitting on top of Apple's UIWebView?

pgambling• 14 years ago

It's still using Apple's UIWebView unfortunately. https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/faq

tvon• 14 years ago

Well, let's see where it is in a week or a month, there are a lot of curiosity installs here...

rkudeshi2• 14 years ago

Indeed. I downloaded it to try it out, and it is very interesting, but there's no way I'm going to even think about really using it until I have the option to set it as the default browser.

melvinmt• 14 years ago

Why do you care if it's the default browser or not? Most of my browser interactions are by intent (that's me pushing the Chrome app icon to get on the internet) the other times when it defaults to Safari, I still get a decent experience - nothing breaks.

dhawalhs• 14 years ago

I find the default browser on iPad very limiting. First of all you can only a have limited number of tabs open and if you open more tabs it closes the earliest opened tab. Another drawback is that you can't search from the address bar. In fact, the pop-up keyboard hides the space bar key. I have been spoiled by the Chrome omnibox.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

Same here. For me the Omnibox is the biggest "lock-in" feature that keeps me on Chrome - not that I've had any reason to switch to something else, or anything. The 2nd biggest one would probably be the pre-rendering of webpages.

johnyzee• 14 years ago

Personally I much prefer the 'awesome bar' in Firefox, for the single reason that it indexes page content and auto-completes based on title tags, page titles, etc. This is the one feature that I really miss when using Chrome.

d0vs• 14 years ago

You mean prerendering every page which is linked to in the current page?

Samuel_Michon3• 14 years ago

I don't see the need for keeping open more than 9 tabs in Safari. Pages I need later, I save in Reading List or Instapaper, which also have the advantage of being available on all my other devices.

sirn3• 14 years ago

> If you open more tabs it closes the earliest opened tab.

This is the case with Chrome for iOS too. At least on my original iPad, Chrome trash the first tab after I open the 4th tab (tested this with Reddit front page) where I can open up to the 9 tabs limit in Mobile Safari. I guess this is just the original iPad showing its age. Things seems to works better on iPhone 4, but my point is Chrome for iOS do trash tabs.

GuiA• 14 years ago

So the behavior seems to be even worse in Chrome, as in Safari you can have 9 tabs open at most no matter what, whereas in iOS Chrome you don't know when a tab will be trashed.

ajross• 14 years ago

Really? I've never seen Chrome close a tab on the Galaxy Nexus. I've gotten it up into the low teens on several occasions...

james33• 14 years ago

I'm not seeing any tabs get trashed on my iPad 3.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

@sindresorhus says Chrome for iOS shows a :) when you have 100+ open tabs: https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/218732360106131457/p...

dr42• 14 years ago

One thing that might help is that even when safari closes a tab, if you tap and hold the + button you will see a list of closed tabs and you can reopen any that were closed.

pooriaazimi3• 14 years ago

In iOS 6 you can open up to 24 tabs. I have 18 tabs open right now :)

rogerchucker3• 14 years ago

I wonder what will happen if Google and a few other big hitters publicly encourage people to jailbreak their iOS devices in order to get the best experience (by avoiding Apple's lame restrictions).

Like suppose Larry Page goes up on stage at Google IO and saying "here's the next version of Chrome for iOS and btw, we suggest you jailbreak you iPhone to get the one with our awesome V8 engine".

I wonder if Apple can take any action against Google after that (other than kicking out current Google apps).

bishnu• 14 years ago

Well kicking out current Google apps would be a huge blow to Google's mobile revenue, so they wouldn't really need to do anything else.

TallGuyShort• 14 years ago

On the other hand, kicking out Google apps would be an even bigger incentive for people to jailbreak their iPhones.

cabalamat• 14 years ago

> if Google and a few other big hitters publicly encourage people to jailbreak their iOS devices

Why would Google do that? They'd rather people use Android devices.

rogerchucker3• 14 years ago

I think Google realizes that iOS has a higher stickiness than Android

rimantas• 14 years ago

Nothing would happen. Maybe there would be five more jailbroken iOS devices. People could not care less about jailbreaking not to mention many don't see Apple restrictions as lame.

idspispopd• 14 years ago

The problem with ideas like this isn't so much a hypothetical situation of what would happen if we decided to burn bridges tomorrow (probably not good.) It's neither about "What would Apple do?" or "How could Google leverage this"... unfortunately the truth is much more mundane.

The point that I feel is forever-lost on this forum, is that you as a user in your position are statistically unique, there aren't a terrible lot of you versus the great expanse of smart phone users out there. The overwhelming majority of smart phone owners are not interested in any of this in the slightest. Ironically, this is especially even more pronounced on the Android platform due to the penetration tactics that have been engaged(taking the cheap-default-handset crown from Nokia). You see yourself and your peers with the latest Android devices, this creates a false bias that everyone is the same as yourself, but you're actually part of the less than 7% of the Android market that uses the latest Android software. (Many of which can't upgrade even if they wanted to.)

This forum presents a group of like minded users who understand ideas like jailbreaking, follow news releases from Google and other tech companies. (Amongst other tech related discussion.)

However, what this forum seems to forget is that they represent a fringe user of both the internet and of technology as a whole. You may use the technology subjectively better, but even then you're still just a sliver out there.

The bias of being surrounded by people who are technical/brilliant/whatever, whether it's in your technically-minded workplace, your awesome university or the online places you lurk. You are still such a tiny fraction of users. There are more people out there using their smart phones to twitter images of their breakfast than there are forum users here. Even the list of unknown tech start ups dwarfs this forum.

The point I'm making, is that you'll have more effect on people by helping them do something incredibly mundane, than you will influence them to change a behaviour for differences that they truly won't notice.

About the idea: No one is buying an Apple product because they hate Apple. If the sole reason to jail break the device and install a competing fully-fledged browser is to stick it to Apple, or provide an experience that is available on Android - then you're talking to someone who is already an Android customer, or will be very soon. There is a mistaken idea that iPhones are status-quo grudge purchases, far from it, rather they're quite expensive propositions in comparison to the vast array of cheaper Android devices.

ddon• 14 years ago

Tried to use Google Docs and got this message: The browser you're using may not support all features of the desktop version of Google Docs.

durga• 14 years ago

Chrome is the best browser out there on laptops. Naturally a lot of people are interested in trying it out on the iPhone.

The app store ranking is determined by number of downloads in the last 5-6 days. Since it just launched, a spike in downloads and a subsequent rise in rankings is expected. Whether it stays on top in the coming weeks/months will determine how it compares to other apps.

TwoBit• 14 years ago

I don't see it being any better than FireFox.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

>Chrome is the best browser out there on laptops.

Only if you have as much memory as a desktop. Chrome is painful to use on anything with limited memory, even with very limited plugin use. (Roughly 20 megs per extension and 50 megs per tab).

I've had much better luck with Safari, even the Windows version. No lastpass for Safari Windows though :(

rkudeshi2• 14 years ago

Just another data point: Opera Mini also hit #1 in every country when it was released.[1]

Is anyone still using it?

[1] http://www.gadgetsdna.com/opera-mini-goes-rampant-tops-all-2...

Samuel_Michon3• 14 years ago

So true. iOS users love trying new apps. That doesn't mean that those apps will actually gain a place on the home screen, or even be in use after a week by the majority of those users (that would be a good metric, but hard to check.)

I didn't even download Chrome for iOS, as I don't use any Google services besides Analytics, Adsense, and Places (I switched to DDG for search.) I don't see the upshot of using Chrome for iOS, because I have all my bookmarks in Safari and use Reading List and iCloud (with Instapaper and Evernote bookmarklets.)

superasn3• 14 years ago

The difference for me at least is that I have replaced the default Safari icon (in the dock bar) with Chrome.. something which I did not do with Opera. A friend of mine did too as I noticed today. So it definitely has better chances of sticking with at least the people I know.

(A little OT but right now the Chrome icon it looks ugly as hell. The black just doesn't seem to mix well with green and blue for some reason)

myko• 14 years ago

Yeah it's too bad the iOS guidelines don't allow for Chrome's traditional icon. This seems like the best compromise they could come up with to maintain their branding.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

Opera is still the top mobile browser worldwide, still used by many on iOS when you want to save bandwidth.

abjr2• 14 years ago

Why does Apple allow competing browsers in the App Store, but not competing mail clients? For me the iPhone's mail app has terrible IMAP support, but there aren't any other options.

rococo• 14 years ago

Have you tried Sparrow? Phenomenal email app for iPhone and iPad soon as well.

abjr2• 14 years ago

Cool, thanks. Guess I haven't searched in a while. I know at one point there were no competing mail apps ... just folder/organizer type apps.

masklinn• 14 years ago

> Why does Apple allow competing browsers in the App Store, but not competing mail clients?

Uh?

http://itunes.apple.com/app/sparrow/id492573565?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/app/emailganizer-pro-email-reader/id...

MikeCapone• 14 years ago

iCab is currently my main browser on the iPad. I've installed Chrome and like it so far, but I'm not sure if I'll stick with iCab or switch over yet..

I do wish that Apple would make Safari's javacript engine available to third party browsers OR allow them to provide their own javascript engine. I don't even care about the ability to open links from other apps with a third party; just give it a level playing field when it comes to speed.

jrockway3• 14 years ago

It's a security thing. Making a dynamic language (or even a static language) perform well means that you have to generate machine code at runtime, because much of the information required for optimization is only available then. But, to run those instructions, you need a writable and executable page of memory. The problem is that having writable and executable pages means that a poorly written loop or string operation can also write code to memory and execute it. So Apple made the decision to W^X (write xor execute) app memory that's not their Safari app so that poorly-programmed apps don't leak user data or compromise the OS. It also conveniently prevents apps from running code that Apple didn't approve, which is probably what they really care about.

Anyway, Apple's business model seems to preclude neat software. Use Android or a laptop if you want a good Chrome experience.

revelation• 14 years ago

Do not pretend this is anything but political. The only way to get a page that is both writable and executable is by specifically requesting one. So no, no loops becoming sentient any time soon.

tnorthcutt• 14 years ago

I was hoping Chrome would offer word wrapping when zoomed in like Android does, but it doesn't.

dorianj• 14 years ago

Chrome is using the UIWebView control (same as Safari, sans NitroJS), so I don't know if that's even possible.

khangtoh• 14 years ago

Hopefully Chrome iOS gets to stick around for a little bit and soon get better Safari for iOS. A little competition is always good.

cema• 14 years ago

I think they run it on reputation, not on the actual quality of the application. Users do not yet have enough experience to judge on the basis of its actual performance.

Google Chrome already No. 1 among free iOS apps

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