A deeper look at Chrome for Android
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
Labels: mobile
Today, we introduced Chrome for Android Beta, which brings Chrome’s capabilities to phones and tablets running Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. This is made possible by a range of innovative features and by building a mobile browser from the ground up that makes full use of the underlying architecture built into Android 4.0.
Chrome for Android brings support for many of the latest HTML5 features to the Android platform. With hardware-accelerated canvas, overflow scroll support, strong HTML5 video support, and new capabilities such as Indexed DB, WebWorkers and Web Sockets, Chrome for Android is a solid platform for developing web content on mobile devices.
In addition to support for the latest web technologies, we hope to make interactive web content super easy to develop. Chrome for Android introduces remote debugging through Chrome Developer Tools to make it simple for developers to debug web sites running live on their mobile devices.
Much of the code for Chrome for Android is already shared with Chromium and over the coming weeks, the Chromium team will be upstreaming many new components developed for Chrome for Android to Chromium, WebKit and other projects.
We’ve got a lot more planned to make Chrome as feature-rich on mobile devices as it is on the desktop. We encourage you to follow any of the ongoing development via the issue tracker or join in on chromium-dev@chromium.org.
Posted by Arnaud Weber, Engineering Manager, Chrome
26 comments:
Alexey Zakharov said...
What about Gingerbread?
February 7, 2012 10:29 AM
Christopher said...
This is great news. Will you be supporting extensions?
February 7, 2012 10:33 AM
kris said...
pls explain why it is not available worldwide. I paid a few bucks for nexus but now I learnt that I'm 2nd category user.
February 7, 2012 10:41 AM
Phillip said...
Agreed. Are there any plans to make this app compatible with pre-ICS devices?
February 7, 2012 10:53 AM
Unknown said...
Really not surprised to see this work pre-ICS. Google is all about pushing people to update their devices. I kind of agree with this, though I do imagine this is annoying for some.
One thing that I am sad about is the phone number detection. The stock Android browser did an excellent job detecting a phone number and allowed you to just click on it to bring up the phone even if there wasn't any markup for it. Looks like Android will need that.
February 7, 2012 11:02 AM
Simon Leinen said...
"Why don't you give it a try?" - well, I would, except I'm in one of the ~180 wrong countries...
February 7, 2012 11:31 AM
coth said...
that's a big fail. first you have to deploy ICS, then you should make it mandatory. not opposite. it's been 4 months since ICS release and it's still not deployed accounting less than a percent of all deceives. that means you failed to deploy ICS, so you should have been doing for 2.x first.
February 7, 2012 11:50 AM
Elnahir said...
Launch Chrome for Android the same day you push the ICS OTA update = win. Otherwise = fail. Sorry Google, that's just the way it goes and your move sucks
February 7, 2012 12:02 PM
gvg.fede said...
It is "Beta" anyway. It's not a real launch, it's a preview. This doesn't explain why it's available for some countries only though; as a Beta, if there were only the EN language it would be understandable.
February 7, 2012 12:13 PM
Matt Keenan said...
When will _Chromium_ be available on the market?
February 7, 2012 12:29 PM
QA guy said...
There are many different android screen sizes out there. From a testing standpoint, we can either wait for a Selenium 2 driver for mobile chrome or we can use an existing Selenium 2 driver (for the full chrome an change the screen resolution).
Please give insight to the following:
What is the better practice (what web driver)?
Will there be a new Selenium web driver developed?
What are the timelines for a Selenium web driver?
thanks
February 7, 2012 12:31 PM
Schnuecks said...
Hello,
i installed from the market but i can't open it. It comes up and chrashes down. Delete it and reinstalled it, nothing happens.
February 7, 2012 12:44 PM
Notz said...
Will there be a lib to use it as webview or do we see chromium as default browser for 4.1?
February 7, 2012 12:44 PM
Steven Roussey said...
Is the web inspector protocol (WIP) there for remote debugging?
February 7, 2012 1:40 PM
Steven Roussey said...
Is the web inspector protocol (WIP) there for remote debugging that allows for extensions? I'm working on a port of Illuminations for Developers that would do wonders for mobile web development, but need to hook into devtools. Currently working on a Chrome extension for desktop, but want it to work for Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile, etc. Thanks!
February 7, 2012 1:45 PM
Pies said...
"This item cannot be installed in your device's country."
Give me a break...
February 7, 2012 3:03 PM
SchizoDuckie said...
Some questions:
- Will we be able to embed this in our android apps as a drop-in webview replacement?
- Will it support extensions?
Some props:
Websockets! <3
THIS IS AWESOME GUYS!!! FINALLY
February 7, 2012 3:34 PM
Seth Hikari said...
Going to answer all the ICS, and Country issue in one go.... BETA
February 7, 2012 4:02 PM
Frans Thamura said...
why ICS only.. arrggghhh!!!
February 7, 2012 4:29 PM
Joe Z said...
What about the awesome feature to save a webpage for offline reading, please bring that to chrome soon!
February 7, 2012 7:59 PM
Quest4Services said...
Not available in my country?!
This is ridiculous!
February 7, 2012 8:45 PM
ashley hanks said...
Love chrome on my nexus. So fast and easy to use
February 8, 2012 12:26 AM
Oren said...
Would really like to see tab sync in the OTHER direction too... i.e. start reading an article on your phone and then continue reading on your PC's larger screen.
February 8, 2012 12:54 AM
Squarex said...
Is there any chance, that it will support armv6? Now many phones with armv6 support ICS very smooth so it would be great if they are supported.
February 8, 2012 2:24 AM
Ryan Abrams said...
For those who cannot wait for Chrome to be available in their country. Please follow the link forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1485473
February 8, 2012 5:32 AM
Brian Kemp said...
Will there be source available for those of us who don't use the Android market?
February 10, 2012 1:05 PM
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