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Yay! Google Chrome for iOS is here!

Incognito Mode (aka "Porn Mode")

(yes, iOS 5 Safari has "Private Browsing," but it's implemented completely wrong and impossible to access in a convenient way)
 
It's pretty nice. Some reviews reported it being slow, doesn't seem to be the case on my wife's 4S.

Chrome on Jelly Bean seems to perform significantly better than it did on ICS.
 
Spoooon said:
It's pretty nice. Some reviews reported it being slow, doesn't seem to be the case on my wife's 4S.

Chrome on Jelly Bean seems to perform significantly better than it did on ICS.
Click to expand...

Chrome on iOS is using the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and the built-in iOS javascript, but not the same, faster Nitro engine that Safari uses. Essentially Chrome is just a reskin of Safari with a few of Google's features baked in.

Performance wise it won't be any better than Safari and will perform worse than Safari when it comes to javascript.
 
I'm so freaking happy to have Chrome on my iPad. I use it as my primary browser on my phone and desktop, so glad my tablet can join in as well.

So far I've run into one website that doesn't seem to work properly with Chrome on the iPad, but does work fine on mobile Safari. If I go to twit.tv, I can't get any of the live streams to load on Chrome, but they work fine on Safari. Even tried disabling the pop-up blocker (since the streams open in a new tab on Safari). But so far this is the only website giving me a problem.

Another issue is if I have several tabs open and go back and forth, some of the tabs have to reload again. If I load the same tabs in Safari, I can go between them without them reloading.
 
Ravynmagi said:
So far I've run into one website that doesn't seem to work properly with Chrome on the iPad, but does work fine on mobile Safari. If I go to twit.tv, I can't get any of the live streams to load on Chrome, but they work fine on Safari. Even tried disabling the pop-up blocker (since the streams open in a new tab on Safari). But so far this is the only website giving me a problem.
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Could it be that Google doesn't use the built-in iOS libraries for that stuff. Have you tried any other streaming sites? If it works elsewhere it could be some weird problem where due to the browsers user agent, it tries giving it a different format that isn't supported by iOS chrome.

Another issue is if I have several tabs open and go back and forth, some of the tabs have to reload again. If I load the same tabs in Safari, I can go between them without them reloading.
Click to expand...

Kind of strange. Only reason I can think of off the top of my head is that iOS doesn't hand out as much RAM to third party browsers as it would to Safari. The other possibility is that Chrome has a larger memory footprint so it can't keep as many tabs in memory.
 
Mopetar said:
... Only reason I can think of off the top of my head is that iOS doesn't hand out as much RAM to third party browsers as it would to Safari. The other possibility is that Chrome has a larger memory footprint so it can't keep as many tabs in memory.
Click to expand...

Still not a good excuse for that behavior. It should store the state of the tab in storage if there's no room in memory, then swap back to memory if you go back to that tab.
 
Ichinisan said:
Still not a good excuse for that behavior. It should store the state of the tab in storage if there's no room in memory, then swap back to memory if you go back to that tab.
Click to expand...

I don't know how many erase cycles the flash memory found in tablets are good for, but I wouldn't want to use it for swap if at all possible.
 
My first observations were casual. So I'm testing it a little more carefully this time.

I loaded 6 tabs in each browser, same sites.

Chrome will allow me to tab between all 6 just fine while I'm in Chrome. But if I leave Chrome then come back in, 3 of the tabs will automatically reload when I visit them.

Same test in Safari, I'm able to exit Safari and come back in and none of the tabs have to reload.

So maybe iOS is letting Safari hold on to memory even after being put into the background, more than third party apps. Which I guess isn't surprising.
 
Follow up. Seems Chrome starts having issues when I opened a 7 tab in both browsers. Even without leaving Chrome, it started having to reload pages. While Safari still seemed fine. Also Chrome starts freezing up when refreshing a couple tabs at once.

Anyway, I'm pushing it more than I'd normally would in the browser. I think I'll still use Chrome. I love that if I tap the address bar, I don't have to "X" out what's currently in it (silly behavior in Safari) and there is a single input bar for addresses and searching.
 
From what I've tried (iphone 4s, ipad 3) Chrome is prone to stuttering and lag compared to Safari. I'll use it occasionally because of the ability to pull up a page I have open on my laptop on the go, and having access to all my Chrome bookmarks, but not for much else.
 
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Super56K said:
From what I've tried (iphone 4s, ipad 3) Chrome is prone to stuttering and lag compared to Safari.
Click to expand...

I've observed the same stutters and lags on iPad 3. I'll keep it on my machine when I want to use an alternate useragentstring, but it's not a Safari replacement yet.

I was really looking forward to Chrome on iPad, but Apple seems to have significantly gimped it with their "you can use any browser you want as long as it's Safari or a re-skin" antics.
 
Sheep said:
I've observed the same stutters and lags on iPad 3. I'll keep it on my machine when I want to use an alternate useragentstring, but it's not a Safari replacement yet.

I was really looking forward to Chrome on iPad, but Apple seems to have significantly gimped it with their "you can use any browser you want as long as it's Safari or a re-skin" antics.
Click to expand...

Yup since they intentionally gimp other browsers which is retarded.
 
I love it on my iPhone4 and iPad3. The only draw back is that its performance is stuttery compared to Safari.
 
Mopetar said:
In theory it shouldn't be much worse than Safari, and only for javascript performance.
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And isn't like half of websites JS these days? If it wasn't a big deal Apple, Google and MS wouldn't be putting some much effort into optimizing their JS engines.
 
From what I can tell at best it's the same speed as Safari with a different skin. Basically pick what desktop browser you like best and choose the corresponding mobile browser to sync bookmarks.
 
boomhower said:
From what I can tell at best it's the same speed as Safari with a different skin. Basically pick what desktop browser you like best and choose the corresponding mobile browser to sync bookmarks.
Click to expand...

Except that with Chrome it's more than bookmarks. At the very least you can sync open tabs so if I'm reading something on Linux I can go to my phone and open the same URL by selecting it from the other devices list. And for desktop->desktop it syncs pretty much everything from settings to extensions to themes.
 
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