Chrome on iOS; Chrome Junior is nice, but I hope for a big brother
Posted by Dion Almaer 10 months ago on chrome ios
Chrome for iOS has hit the top of the app store, and having more browser competition is great. The keynote didn’t go into any of the details, so you were left wondering:
- Is it their rendering engine?
- I don’t see how it can be v8 (can’t write a JIT)
- Did they do some kind of deal with Apple to get the exec bit turned on so they would at least get a Nitro boost?
Nada. Just a “chrome” around UIWebView that is 2 to 3x slower at pure JavaScript. This isn’t the be all and end all for performance, and they can still pull out some tricks to give you an enhanced perceived performance (more agressive preloading etc), but it is hard to use a browser when you know it is crippled. The UX has some nice touches (and gestures), but it has also been strange for me to get used to the URL bar always on the top (even though it gives you more room as their is no need for the bottom toolbar). I bet I would get used to that. I also found that I would get false positives on edge swipes. Having access to my shared history + passwords etc is a great feature, and the tab management is much nicer than Safari, but all in all I think it gets relegated to the “browsers” folder with Dolphin and friends.
I look forward to some healthy competition, and I really hope that we get to a world where we really get to see Chrome shine. I want v8, Chrome APIs, and all of its goodness. I was hoping that some changes to the app store guidelines would enable some of that, and I hope that in the future we have a chance at the v8 piece.
And then there is the ChromeWebView dream.
