Chrome on Android

[TheStu]

Per this article on TechCrunch, maybe someday;

Why isn’t Chrome a part of Android? It’s a question as old as time itself. Or at least a few years old. But given that the same company, Google, makes both products, it never made much sense. Now they’re finally taking steps to resolve this. A bit. Maybe.

As a group of Googlers have announced on the WebKit-Dev group today (relayed by Google’s Peter Beverloo), the Android team is now committed to working more closely with the WebKit community. Yes, it’s a bit odd that a product so devoted to “open” wasn’t really working with the open source community before — but hey, better late than never.

Writes Andrei Popescu:


We would like to give an update about WebKit on Android. A while ago, we started the effort to upstream the Android port of WebKit. For a variety of reasons, this work took longer than anticipated and was never finished. We realize that the incomplete Android port that exists today in WebKit ToT has caused quite a bit of confusion and inconvenience to the project as a whole and we are very sorry for that.

The full story is a bit more complicated than it appears on the surface. While Android has its own separate browser which isn’t branded as “Chrome”, the two do share some code. But they’re not the same, and two separate teams work on each. For whatever reason, Google chose not to brand the Android browser as Chrome, and doing so now may cause some confusion since there’s Chrome OS — another operating system built by Google that’s unrelated to Android.

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Source

This has bugged me for a while. I have Internet Explorer on my WinMoPho, I had Safari on my iPhone, but Google didn't call the browser on the phone Chrome. I realize that the phone came first, but why not update it with 2.0 (or whatever)?

 

[xBiffx]

Good read. I have often wondered this but it doesn't bother me. To me a browser is a browser as long as its not Internet Exploder.

 

[Oyeve]

Good read. I have often wondered this but it doesn't bother me. To me a browser is a browser as long as its not Internet Exploder.

or safari.

 

[mammador]

Opera on Android is best IMO. IE, whether mobile or traditional PC in form, was created by the Devil himself, it's a pile of shit with zero functionality.

 

[runawayprisoner]

I think it's fairly obvious that the Android team is either not too competent at making the Android fork of WebKit usable enough to commit to the main branch, or it is just that they work on too many parts of the OS at once, and never had the time to turn around to WebKit, nor to finish anything that matters.

It's just like GPU Compositing in Android. It's possible. Community and third-party devs have made it possible with their apps for a long while. Opera made an excellent one for their browser. LauncherPro was probably among the first ones to start... but it wasn't until 3.0 that the Android team started work on it, and it still isn't complete in 3.2.

And the reason given was that there were too many hardware configurations, and with the lowest denominator, they found that enabling GPU Compositing would cause too much trouble or it's just slow.

But hey, 2.3 is only available on some of the high-end phones... short of what community developers hacked to work with other devices and older phones. So I have to ask... does it really matter?

It's the same thing with WebKit. I don't suspect it's the same reason why they didn't release 3.0 source code for a long while.