21 ms·

There are now at least eight Chromium-based Android default browsers

238 points by mmastrac 12y ago

B-Con 12y ago
> Oh, and remember that Chrome on iOS is not Chrome at all, but Apple WebView, which on iOS8 is supposed to be the same as Safari. That’s because you are not allowed to install other rendering engines on iOS. What exactly does this mean: Does Apple review and reject apps that have a rendering engine, or does iOS have some magic to prevent other rendering engines from working?
- spb 12y ago
  The former.
- eunoia 12y ago
  I was curious so I went and looked it up in the App Store Review Guidelines 2.17 Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Iirc, it is not strictly the render engine that is the issue but the JS engine. But quite often those are most often lumped under "render engine" by tech sites.
- mejari 12y ago
  >Does Apple review and reject apps that have a rendering engine This is the answer
- chuckcode 12y ago
  I had no idea that Apple had this restriction on apps. Quick search pulls up article to show that this is indeed the case [1]. This seems incredibly restrictive especially particularly since Microsoft got into substantial trouble just for bundling internet explorer back in the day [2]. Are there any technical reasons for this restriction? [1] http://www.howtogeek.com/184283/why-third-party-browsers-will-always-be-inferior-to-safari-on-iphone-and-ipad/ http://www.howtogeek.com/184283/why-third-party-browsers-wil... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Microsoft got into substantial trouble just for bundling internet explorer back in the day No, they didn't. They got in trouble for attempting to protect monopoly power in the desktop personal computer operating system market and extent that power into other markets by, among other means, bundling IE.
  - felipeerias 12y ago
    Developers can not bundle their own runtime and execute code that they download from the Internet. My understanding is that this constraint results in increased security and performance, while also ensuring that Apple keep their control on what runs on the device.
  - wishinghand 12y ago
    That restriction is why there is no iOS Firefox.
  - adrusi 12y ago
    iOS has its roots in web apps. The original iPhone didn't support third party apps, and Apple was pushing developers to use web technology to make apps. This attitude persisted for a long time and to an extent persists even today. When they introduced apps, they didn't want web apps to run differently in, say, the embedded browser of an RSS reader, than in Safari, because users have no clue that there's such a thing as different rendering engines and would be confused. Of course, for a long time, WebViews and Safari used different versions of webkit, but at least they had identically implemented APIs for integrating with mobile hardware and such.
_lce0 12y ago
so nice to see a quirksmode post in front-page again!! ahh the nostalgia
newhouseb 12y ago
Another important thing is Chrome's rapid release process works under the assumption that most issues that crop up will be fixed quickly in a later version, rather than be back-ported. Which is to say that there are no Ubuntu-esque LTS versions of Chrome, so whatever random bugs happen to exist in the version of Chrome that each vendor forks will likely be there for a long long time, making this fiasco that much worse.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Seems like Google is trying to apply web development methodology to software...
  - CydeWeys 12y ago
    What does this have to do with web development in particular? Regardless of the kind of software involved, if YOU fork, it's YOUR responsibility to merge upstream patches and fixes over time. If the various vendor-branded Chromia aren't doing it, then it's entirely on them. Upstream Chromium is open source, and the code for all of those fixes and patches is available in the open.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      Don't bother with a LTE/patch-only branch, just "iterate iterate iterate" as the just user coming down the net connection will get your latest anyways...
    - serge2k 12y ago
      Maintaining a fork as complex as Chromium is probably more work than these companies are willing/able to do.
      - cloudwalking 12y ago
        Then they shouldn't fork it.
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
Oh, this is for the mobile version. I was thinking desktop. I'm getting awfully tired of reading "[Harmless niche feature X] is being removed from Chrome to reduce menu clutter. If anyone still wants it, it should be possible to recreate it with an extension."
- titanomachy 12y ago
  What have they removed in this way? IMHO Reducing menu clutter should be done by making an "advanced" settings tab, not by requiring extensions...
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    Off the top of my head, View Selection Source in the right-click menu, and the ability to set a default background color (so that you can navigate dark-colored sites without them flashing blinding white each time a new page starts to display, and so you can make out dark images when viewing them in a separate tab). Neither one has ever gotten a really satisfactory extension, although there is an awkward View Selection Source plugin that mostly works. IIRC, the default background color was only accessible by jumping through hoops to begin with; they just decided to remove it anyway because...nobody used it? Except for the hundreds and hundreds of people who complained, but they don't count? I read the justification in the bug report and I still don't get it. I've seen at least three others that I can't recall right now. It's really, really annoying. (There's also the thing where they are in the process of deprecating NPAPI, which among other things means permanently killing support for browser games written in Unity. That at least has some technical/security justification, from what I've heard.)
    - magicalist 12y ago
      > View Selection Source in the right-click menu AFAIK, Chrome has never had "View Selection Source" in the right-click menu. Firefox does, maybe that's what you're thinking of?
      - 12y ago
talmand 12y ago
Why does this make a claim about Chrome when it's talking about Chromium forks?
nathanb 12y ago
The usual Google product lifecycle: * Create new product to great fanfare * New product sees wide adoption * Many competitors to new product die off due to Google's monopolistic practices * Google decide supporting the now-standard product is not lucrative enough and abandon it * Massive ecosystem gap I see Chrome on the desktop moving in this direction. It is massive and bloated and has become the thing it was designed to overthrow. One process per tab does not scale. Chromebooks are becoming less and less relevant. Surely the mobile situation is indicative of reduced corporate support for the project as a whole.
- AlexandrB 12y ago
  > * Create new product to great fanfare > * New product sees wide adoption > * Many competitors to new product die off due to Google's monopolistic practices > * Google decide supporting the now-standard product is not lucrative enough and abandon it > * Massive ecosystem gap In my lifetime this has gone from describing Microsoft to describing Google. Amazing!
  - frikk 12y ago
    Meanwhile, Microsoft has gone on to open source core components of their offerings (with no signs of slowing down) and Apple (not surprisingly) is locking down developers even further with requiring signed drivers by default (I think -- not confirmed). Amazing how things can shift.
    - exelius 12y ago
      To be fair, it's not hard to get a signing key for Apple (anyone with $99/yr can get one). And it's not just drivers -- ALL apps must be signed by default.
    - wooger 12y ago
      Google open source stuff, true, but their development practices leave much to be desired, and in some cases seem designed to limit the usefulness of the source. Chromium source is a nightmare to build, and requires random, specific versions of the opensource components, or sometimes incorporates requires Google's own forked, slightly different and broken versions. Android source is becoming less useful as a viable OS replacement every version, as so many apps are tied solely to the Play APIs.
ixtli 12y ago
But Android is _open_ !
luos 12y ago
I don't know but they removed the reflow from the browser used in Motorola E 2gen and for me who only uses it for reading on the tube this almost made it unusable. I can only read in horizontal mode or scrolling left and right on every row. I set opera as the default browser because that supports it but apps like Pocket are unusable for reading stuff like HN comments. According to them it's a wontfix. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378 This makes me so angry, I wish I wouldn't have upgraded from a Huawei G510... I feel I wasted my money on shit.
- nilliams 12y ago
  If I understand correctly, you are asking the browser to provide a workaround for a website that isn't optimised for mobile, and asking that browser to maintain that workaround forever? I'm surprised they ever tried to do this in the first place. Reddit has now had a hell of a long time to deliver a mobile-optimised site, responsive or otherwise. I feel like your criticisms would be better directed towards them. Edit: Btw I'm sure some people may comment that it's not just Reddit and there are 1000's of sites that were more easily viewable on a text-wrapping Android browser previously. That's undoubtedly true, but how will the web ever move on from its fixed-width-desktop-sized past if we don't force the offending websites to fix their broken fixed-width styles. We can't workaround that bad idea forever.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >If I understand correctly, you are asking the browser to provide a workaround for a website that isn't optimised for mobile, and asking that browser to maintain that workaround forever? Yeah, why not? Programs exists to help their users. I could not care less if the website developers are sloppy or whatever, if the browser can give me legible text, it should do it.
    - oldmanjay 12y ago
      From your perspective that is true, of course, but it is a greedy perspective that optimizes locally at a cost to the entire ecosystem.
Mithaldu 12y ago
> Android 4.3+ devices, including those by Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony, Huawei, and Xiaomi, have their own default browser on the homescreen What exactly is he talking about? I have a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact and on the home screen i have Google Chrome and Google Play Store claims i have the official Google Chrome version installed and the only other browser i have on there is firefox.
- tdkl 12y ago
  What's your Android version ? They might have changed it and set Chrome as default in Lollipop.
  - Mithaldu 12y ago
    I am indeed on Lollipop, however even before that, on, i believe 4.4.4, the situation was the same.
    - tdkl 12y ago
      Google began pressuring more Google apps since Kitkat yes, but Z1 started with JB and I presume that where the stock AOSP browser still was.
skrowl 12y ago
First thing to do when getting a new Android phone (or flashing a new rom): Install Firefox
LordKano 12y ago
I like the idea of having Chrome out there but I am not going to use it. I like having another serious competitor in the browser market to keep everyone else on their toes. I find Chrome to be unusable. I can't get past the lack of a menu bar. Maybe that's picayunish but I find it so distracting that I can't use the browser at all.
DannyBee 12y ago
In which we compare an open source project that people are compiling and building versions of (Chromium), with a Google Product (Chrome), and pretend that versions of the former are versions of the latter. In other news, GCC continues to fall apart at a brisk pace, with literally every distro shipping slightly different versions.
- exelius 12y ago
  > In other news, GCC continues to fall apart at a brisk pace, with literally every distro shipping slightly different versions. Heh, this is actually true. Clang/llvm are rapidly replacing GCC, largely due to this issue (though performance plays a part as well).
  - Crito 12y ago
    Do Linux distros that have their own patches for GCC not have their own patches for clang/LLVM? Why would this be the case?
    - DannyBee 12y ago
      It's not the case, they have patches for both :)
    - plorkyeran 12y ago
      They haven't had time to accumulate patches that were useful five years ago but now just make things pointlessly slightly different. Similarly, you can generally assume that if someone has clang then it will be a relatively recent version of clang, because of how fast clang moved from not being practically usable to being very good. In a few years I assume that all of the various annoyances around targeting GCC on Linux will also apply to clang.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    There's also some complication from GCC being developed as part of GNU. You'd think this wouldn't be a problem in practice, but I remember (yet can't seem to find, unfortunately) a rather significant spat on the GCC mailing lists about the more hardcore GNUsiances refusing to implement a better AST (or at least one as good as clang's/LLVM's) solely because doing so would run the risk of the AST being used to reverse-engineer GCC beyond the terms of the GPL and a bunch of core GCC devs threatening to fork and ditch GNU because of it.
istvan__ 12y ago
I wish it was working at least on Yosemite properly.
silverlight 12y ago
When Apple first said they would only allow a single web rendering engine on iOS, at first I was heavily against the idea. But now as a web developer who is absolutely not looking forward to the inevitable "people running around with 10 version out of date Chromium browsers", I'm starting to think Apple had the right idea. I can test a website on a single iOS device and know it will work the same on all devices in that version of iOS even if they are using "Chrome on iOS" or "Opera on iOS" or any other browser. I have no idea how I'm supposed to test a site for 13 different Chromium forks. And as time goes on, they will only grow more and more divergent from the main Chromium branch, which means they won't have bug fixes or new features.
- snupples 12y ago
  You should develop towards standards rather than a particular platform.
  - Xylakant 12y ago
    Standards are nice and dandy, real-world-implementations all suffer from bugs, missing features or implement undefined behavior slightly different. So if you want to support an implementation, you need to test it. If there multiple versions of an implementation you want to support, you need to test them all. Any other approach is "it works on X, it might work on Y, but we're not actively supporting Y."
  - jaredsohn 12y ago
    From a practical standpoint, don't you still need to test it against popular platforms though? (If you develop to the standard and a popular browser doesn't support the standards correctly as far as your users are concerned, it is your problem.)
  - awj 12y ago
    If every browser vendor fully and correctly implemented a standard on their first try, you'd have an excellent point. As it is right now, even people that develop towards standards still have to choose between deviating from those standards to support a wider audience or sticking to the standards and turning away users.
jallmann 12y ago
Curmudgeon time: reflow and zoom were probably my favorite features of the original Motorola Droid browser. There were zoom ( +, - ) buttons in the lower-right to zoom in and out -- accessible one handed, with your thumb, none of that pinch-to-zoom nonsense. And the text reflowed on zoom! Further iterations of Android slowly stripped out these features -- first the buttons went, in favor of pinch-to-zoom, then reflow in favor of... a worse user experience. Most sites with a lot of horizontal text (hello, HN!) are hard to read in portrait mode without constantly scrolling. Phones are faster than ever, I don't see why computational requirements would be a good reason for disabling reflow. Turn off all those damn animated-transparent-rounded transitions and give me back my reflow. As far as I can tell, none of the major mobile OSes (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) ship with text reflow in the browser by default. Well, except HTC Android, according to the article. And that is maddening.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Reflow on pages with indented text, as HN, is a borderline mess. More often then not the text is reflowed but the indent preserved, thus requiring horizontal scrolling to bring the full text into view...
  - ethanbond 12y ago
    Which is the proper way to do it... The alternative being ending up with a 1-character wide column of text.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      Except that people want reflow exactly to avoid having to do horizontal scrolling. Then again, most of the time what is wanted is not so much zoom as the ability to bump up the font size.
      - Dylan16807 12y ago
        I want reflow to avoid mid-line horizontal scrolling. I don't really care if each block of text gets offset.
GnarfGnarf 12y ago
I don't think Google is putting much resources in Chrome. I ran into a bug where I had to multiply all coordinates in an SVG file by 100 in order for Chrome to correctly detect the "hot spot" in an icon. It used to be IE that needed the kludges.
habosa 12y ago
This is up to some combination of the OEM and the carrier. For instance I just bought a Verizon Samsung Galaxy S6 and it definitely came with Chrome as the default browser and no other browser. However the TMobile version comes with both Chrome and Samsung's S Browser, setting Samsung's as the default. I can't imagine why an OEM would take the effort to develop a browser when Chrome is there...
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  If you can't imagine why, for example, Samsung would want its own browser, your imagination is severely lacking.
wwweston 12y ago
I worked on the front-end of a mobile/tablet online shopping tool for a big 5 automaker for about a year and a half. At the end of all of it, if anyone asks me what I recommend for mobile/tablet web development (and they usually don't because everyone presumes the standard is pixel-perfect app-like appearance/behavior), it's simple layouts that accommodate the idea that your CSS is a suggestion and lightly enhanced interaction with not-constantly-running JS... unless the product absolutely requires some other mode of interaction. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them was exactly this problem with Android. During the time I was working with it I don't think we ever thoroughly cracked what signifiers would help us reliably reproduce reported issues... let alone fix them (you can detect a whiff of my desperation this time last year from this unanswered SO question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23142762/how-to-identify-factors-that-will-help-reproduce-web-rendering-bugs-for-android http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23142762/how-to-identify-... ). Not my problem anymore. Last I heard the new owners are planning to rewrite with more responsive design and using angular. Should be fun.
- wldcordeiro 12y ago
  It isn't just Android anymore. A project I worked on has been getting a lot of reports of layout issues on iOS for alternate browsers like Chrome. We have no issues with Safari but the alternates seem to throw some wrenches in the system.
  - m_mueller 12y ago
    At least these aren't the default on any phone though, so their usage statistics should be relatively low.
  - Gustomaximus 12y ago
    The worry with Chrome for me is not that these issues happen, but that they seem to be slow in fixing them. I'd hate to find Google have pulled resource now they have a dominant position in the browser market and will languish in the way older version of IE did.
  - cloudwalking 12y ago
Spoom 12y ago
Welcome to my personal hell. Samsung used to be the worst but HTC may have usurped that position. - Cordova-based Android app developer
- grrowl 12y ago
  I left my last job after management sold a Cordova solution. We didn't have the tech in-house to dev/test, but had already sold it anyway, leading to a death spiral of developer hell as we needed to support Android 4.0.1, our Android test phone was a $30 LG which barely displayed the home screen. iOS worked great — or at least, predictably enough to repro + fix anything we caught.
  - joshstrange 12y ago
    > our Android test phone was a $30 LG which barely displayed the home screen Ugh I know this pain, I did some Titanium Appcelerator development for a while and I had the newest iPhone a previous gen to test with but the Android phone was worse than bargain bin. It really skewed my perception of Android and it was hell working with such a shitty device. On top of management wating it to work on super old phones (needs to work "everywhere" and my QA consisted of me with a single phone and a laptop that could barely run the simulator (which was really shitty back then, I've heard it's gotten better). I hated that shit.
- lnanek2 12y ago
  You can use CrossWalk to ensure you have the same Chrome version across all Android devices. That said, it does make the APK very heavy.
thomasfoster96 12y ago
If you're developing an app for Android that uses WebViews, your best bet is probably to start using Intel's CrossWalk project. At the cost of quite a few dozen megabytes in app size, you get the latest Chrome (well, the latest when you published your app) plus a few of Intel's pet web projects (SIMD, TypedObjects). That said, as annoying as it is that Safari on iOS is slow to pick up new web technologies, atleast I know that the vast majority of iOS users are using a browser updated within the past year, and it's all the same browser engine underneath.
serve_yay 12y ago
Jesus, what a disaster.
cateye 12y ago
I would like to know what behavior is different with some real examples of broken functionality.
RyanMcGreal 12y ago
> Although Google Chrome is installed on all Android 4.3+ devices Is this correct? My phone (Galaxy S3) is running Android 4.4.2 and Play Store tells me I don't have Chrome installed.

238 points by mmastrac 12y ago

B-Con 12y ago

> Oh, and remember that Chrome on iOS is not Chrome at all, but Apple WebView, which on iOS8 is supposed to be the same as Safari. That’s because you are not allowed to install other rendering engines on iOS. What exactly does this mean: Does Apple review and reject apps that have a rendering engine, or does iOS have some magic to prevent other rendering engines from working?

spb 12y ago
The former.
eunoia 12y ago
I was curious so I went and looked it up in the App Store Review Guidelines 2.17 Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript
digi_owl 12y ago
Iirc, it is not strictly the render engine that is the issue but the JS engine. But quite often those are most often lumped under "render engine" by tech sites.
mejari 12y ago
>Does Apple review and reject apps that have a rendering engine This is the answer
chuckcode 12y ago
I had no idea that Apple had this restriction on apps. Quick search pulls up article to show that this is indeed the case [1]. This seems incredibly restrictive especially particularly since Microsoft got into substantial trouble just for bundling internet explorer back in the day [2]. Are there any technical reasons for this restriction? [1] http://www.howtogeek.com/184283/why-third-party-browsers-will-always-be-inferior-to-safari-on-iphone-and-ipad/ http://www.howtogeek.com/184283/why-third-party-browsers-wil... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Microsoft got into substantial trouble just for bundling internet explorer back in the day No, they didn't. They got in trouble for attempting to protect monopoly power in the desktop personal computer operating system market and extent that power into other markets by, among other means, bundling IE.
- felipeerias 12y ago
  Developers can not bundle their own runtime and execute code that they download from the Internet. My understanding is that this constraint results in increased security and performance, while also ensuring that Apple keep their control on what runs on the device.
- wishinghand 12y ago
  That restriction is why there is no iOS Firefox.
- adrusi 12y ago
  iOS has its roots in web apps. The original iPhone didn't support third party apps, and Apple was pushing developers to use web technology to make apps. This attitude persisted for a long time and to an extent persists even today. When they introduced apps, they didn't want web apps to run differently in, say, the embedded browser of an RSS reader, than in Safari, because users have no clue that there's such a thing as different rendering engines and would be confused. Of course, for a long time, WebViews and Safari used different versions of webkit, but at least they had identically implemented APIs for integrating with mobile hardware and such.

_lce0 12y ago

so nice to see a quirksmode post in front-page again!! ahh the nostalgia

newhouseb 12y ago

Another important thing is Chrome's rapid release process works under the assumption that most issues that crop up will be fixed quickly in a later version, rather than be back-ported. Which is to say that there are no Ubuntu-esque LTS versions of Chrome, so whatever random bugs happen to exist in the version of Chrome that each vendor forks will likely be there for a long long time, making this fiasco that much worse.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
digi_owl 12y ago
Seems like Google is trying to apply web development methodology to software...
- CydeWeys 12y ago
  What does this have to do with web development in particular? Regardless of the kind of software involved, if YOU fork, it's YOUR responsibility to merge upstream patches and fixes over time. If the various vendor-branded Chromia aren't doing it, then it's entirely on them. Upstream Chromium is open source, and the code for all of those fixes and patches is available in the open.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Don't bother with a LTE/patch-only branch, just "iterate iterate iterate" as the just user coming down the net connection will get your latest anyways...
  - serge2k 12y ago
    Maintaining a fork as complex as Chromium is probably more work than these companies are willing/able to do.
    - cloudwalking 12y ago
      Then they shouldn't fork it.

PhasmaFelis 12y ago

Oh, this is for the mobile version. I was thinking desktop. I'm getting awfully tired of reading "[Harmless niche feature X] is being removed from Chrome to reduce menu clutter. If anyone still wants it, it should be possible to recreate it with an extension."

titanomachy 12y ago
What have they removed in this way? IMHO Reducing menu clutter should be done by making an "advanced" settings tab, not by requiring extensions...
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  Off the top of my head, View Selection Source in the right-click menu, and the ability to set a default background color (so that you can navigate dark-colored sites without them flashing blinding white each time a new page starts to display, and so you can make out dark images when viewing them in a separate tab). Neither one has ever gotten a really satisfactory extension, although there is an awkward View Selection Source plugin that mostly works. IIRC, the default background color was only accessible by jumping through hoops to begin with; they just decided to remove it anyway because...nobody used it? Except for the hundreds and hundreds of people who complained, but they don't count? I read the justification in the bug report and I still don't get it. I've seen at least three others that I can't recall right now. It's really, really annoying. (There's also the thing where they are in the process of deprecating NPAPI, which among other things means permanently killing support for browser games written in Unity. That at least has some technical/security justification, from what I've heard.)
  - magicalist 12y ago
    > View Selection Source in the right-click menu AFAIK, Chrome has never had "View Selection Source" in the right-click menu. Firefox does, maybe that's what you're thinking of?
    - 12y ago

talmand 12y ago

Why does this make a claim about Chrome when it's talking about Chromium forks?

nathanb 12y ago

The usual Google product lifecycle: * Create new product to great fanfare * New product sees wide adoption * Many competitors to new product die off due to Google's monopolistic practices * Google decide supporting the now-standard product is not lucrative enough and abandon it * Massive ecosystem gap I see Chrome on the desktop moving in this direction. It is massive and bloated and has become the thing it was designed to overthrow. One process per tab does not scale. Chromebooks are becoming less and less relevant. Surely the mobile situation is indicative of reduced corporate support for the project as a whole.

AlexandrB 12y ago
> * Create new product to great fanfare > * New product sees wide adoption > * Many competitors to new product die off due to Google's monopolistic practices > * Google decide supporting the now-standard product is not lucrative enough and abandon it > * Massive ecosystem gap In my lifetime this has gone from describing Microsoft to describing Google. Amazing!
- frikk 12y ago
  Meanwhile, Microsoft has gone on to open source core components of their offerings (with no signs of slowing down) and Apple (not surprisingly) is locking down developers even further with requiring signed drivers by default (I think -- not confirmed). Amazing how things can shift.
  - exelius 12y ago
    To be fair, it's not hard to get a signing key for Apple (anyone with $99/yr can get one). And it's not just drivers -- ALL apps must be signed by default.
  - wooger 12y ago
    Google open source stuff, true, but their development practices leave much to be desired, and in some cases seem designed to limit the usefulness of the source. Chromium source is a nightmare to build, and requires random, specific versions of the opensource components, or sometimes incorporates requires Google's own forked, slightly different and broken versions. Android source is becoming less useful as a viable OS replacement every version, as so many apps are tied solely to the Play APIs.

ixtli 12y ago

But Android is _open_ !

luos 12y ago

I don't know but they removed the reflow from the browser used in Motorola E 2gen and for me who only uses it for reading on the tube this almost made it unusable. I can only read in horizontal mode or scrolling left and right on every row. I set opera as the default browser because that supports it but apps like Pocket are unusable for reading stuff like HN comments. According to them it's a wontfix. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378 This makes me so angry, I wish I wouldn't have upgraded from a Huawei G510... I feel I wasted my money on shit.

nilliams 12y ago
If I understand correctly, you are asking the browser to provide a workaround for a website that isn't optimised for mobile, and asking that browser to maintain that workaround forever? I'm surprised they ever tried to do this in the first place. Reddit has now had a hell of a long time to deliver a mobile-optimised site, responsive or otherwise. I feel like your criticisms would be better directed towards them. Edit: Btw I'm sure some people may comment that it's not just Reddit and there are 1000's of sites that were more easily viewable on a text-wrapping Android browser previously. That's undoubtedly true, but how will the web ever move on from its fixed-width-desktop-sized past if we don't force the offending websites to fix their broken fixed-width styles. We can't workaround that bad idea forever.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >If I understand correctly, you are asking the browser to provide a workaround for a website that isn't optimised for mobile, and asking that browser to maintain that workaround forever? Yeah, why not? Programs exists to help their users. I could not care less if the website developers are sloppy or whatever, if the browser can give me legible text, it should do it.
  - oldmanjay 12y ago
    From your perspective that is true, of course, but it is a greedy perspective that optimizes locally at a cost to the entire ecosystem.

Mithaldu 12y ago

> Android 4.3+ devices, including those by Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony, Huawei, and Xiaomi, have their own default browser on the homescreen What exactly is he talking about? I have a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact and on the home screen i have Google Chrome and Google Play Store claims i have the official Google Chrome version installed and the only other browser i have on there is firefox.

tdkl 12y ago
What's your Android version ? They might have changed it and set Chrome as default in Lollipop.
- Mithaldu 12y ago
  I am indeed on Lollipop, however even before that, on, i believe 4.4.4, the situation was the same.
  - tdkl 12y ago
    Google began pressuring more Google apps since Kitkat yes, but Z1 started with JB and I presume that where the stock AOSP browser still was.

skrowl 12y ago

First thing to do when getting a new Android phone (or flashing a new rom): Install Firefox

LordKano 12y ago

I like the idea of having Chrome out there but I am not going to use it. I like having another serious competitor in the browser market to keep everyone else on their toes. I find Chrome to be unusable. I can't get past the lack of a menu bar. Maybe that's picayunish but I find it so distracting that I can't use the browser at all.

DannyBee 12y ago

In which we compare an open source project that people are compiling and building versions of (Chromium), with a Google Product (Chrome), and pretend that versions of the former are versions of the latter. In other news, GCC continues to fall apart at a brisk pace, with literally every distro shipping slightly different versions.

exelius 12y ago
> In other news, GCC continues to fall apart at a brisk pace, with literally every distro shipping slightly different versions. Heh, this is actually true. Clang/llvm are rapidly replacing GCC, largely due to this issue (though performance plays a part as well).
- Crito 12y ago
  Do Linux distros that have their own patches for GCC not have their own patches for clang/LLVM? Why would this be the case?
  - DannyBee 12y ago
    It's not the case, they have patches for both :)
  - plorkyeran 12y ago
    They haven't had time to accumulate patches that were useful five years ago but now just make things pointlessly slightly different. Similarly, you can generally assume that if someone has clang then it will be a relatively recent version of clang, because of how fast clang moved from not being practically usable to being very good. In a few years I assume that all of the various annoyances around targeting GCC on Linux will also apply to clang.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  There's also some complication from GCC being developed as part of GNU. You'd think this wouldn't be a problem in practice, but I remember (yet can't seem to find, unfortunately) a rather significant spat on the GCC mailing lists about the more hardcore GNUsiances refusing to implement a better AST (or at least one as good as clang's/LLVM's) solely because doing so would run the risk of the AST being used to reverse-engineer GCC beyond the terms of the GPL and a bunch of core GCC devs threatening to fork and ditch GNU because of it.

istvan__ 12y ago

I wish it was working at least on Yosemite properly.

silverlight 12y ago

When Apple first said they would only allow a single web rendering engine on iOS, at first I was heavily against the idea. But now as a web developer who is absolutely not looking forward to the inevitable "people running around with 10 version out of date Chromium browsers", I'm starting to think Apple had the right idea. I can test a website on a single iOS device and know it will work the same on all devices in that version of iOS even if they are using "Chrome on iOS" or "Opera on iOS" or any other browser. I have no idea how I'm supposed to test a site for 13 different Chromium forks. And as time goes on, they will only grow more and more divergent from the main Chromium branch, which means they won't have bug fixes or new features.

snupples 12y ago
You should develop towards standards rather than a particular platform.
- Xylakant 12y ago
  Standards are nice and dandy, real-world-implementations all suffer from bugs, missing features or implement undefined behavior slightly different. So if you want to support an implementation, you need to test it. If there multiple versions of an implementation you want to support, you need to test them all. Any other approach is "it works on X, it might work on Y, but we're not actively supporting Y."
- jaredsohn 12y ago
  From a practical standpoint, don't you still need to test it against popular platforms though? (If you develop to the standard and a popular browser doesn't support the standards correctly as far as your users are concerned, it is your problem.)
- awj 12y ago
  If every browser vendor fully and correctly implemented a standard on their first try, you'd have an excellent point. As it is right now, even people that develop towards standards still have to choose between deviating from those standards to support a wider audience or sticking to the standards and turning away users.

jallmann 12y ago

Curmudgeon time: reflow and zoom were probably my favorite features of the original Motorola Droid browser. There were zoom ( +, - ) buttons in the lower-right to zoom in and out -- accessible one handed, with your thumb, none of that pinch-to-zoom nonsense. And the text reflowed on zoom! Further iterations of Android slowly stripped out these features -- first the buttons went, in favor of pinch-to-zoom, then reflow in favor of... a worse user experience. Most sites with a lot of horizontal text (hello, HN!) are hard to read in portrait mode without constantly scrolling. Phones are faster than ever, I don't see why computational requirements would be a good reason for disabling reflow. Turn off all those damn animated-transparent-rounded transitions and give me back my reflow. As far as I can tell, none of the major mobile OSes (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) ship with text reflow in the browser by default. Well, except HTC Android, according to the article. And that is maddening.

digi_owl 12y ago
Reflow on pages with indented text, as HN, is a borderline mess. More often then not the text is reflowed but the indent preserved, thus requiring horizontal scrolling to bring the full text into view...
- ethanbond 12y ago
  Which is the proper way to do it... The alternative being ending up with a 1-character wide column of text.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Except that people want reflow exactly to avoid having to do horizontal scrolling. Then again, most of the time what is wanted is not so much zoom as the ability to bump up the font size.
    - Dylan16807 12y ago
      I want reflow to avoid mid-line horizontal scrolling. I don't really care if each block of text gets offset.

GnarfGnarf 12y ago

I don't think Google is putting much resources in Chrome. I ran into a bug where I had to multiply all coordinates in an SVG file by 100 in order for Chrome to correctly detect the "hot spot" in an icon. It used to be IE that needed the kludges.

habosa 12y ago

This is up to some combination of the OEM and the carrier. For instance I just bought a Verizon Samsung Galaxy S6 and it definitely came with Chrome as the default browser and no other browser. However the TMobile version comes with both Chrome and Samsung's S Browser, setting Samsung's as the default. I can't imagine why an OEM would take the effort to develop a browser when Chrome is there...

sanxiyn 12y ago
If you can't imagine why, for example, Samsung would want its own browser, your imagination is severely lacking.

wwweston 12y ago

I worked on the front-end of a mobile/tablet online shopping tool for a big 5 automaker for about a year and a half. At the end of all of it, if anyone asks me what I recommend for mobile/tablet web development (and they usually don't because everyone presumes the standard is pixel-perfect app-like appearance/behavior), it's simple layouts that accommodate the idea that your CSS is a suggestion and lightly enhanced interaction with not-constantly-running JS... unless the product absolutely requires some other mode of interaction. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them was exactly this problem with Android. During the time I was working with it I don't think we ever thoroughly cracked what signifiers would help us reliably reproduce reported issues... let alone fix them (you can detect a whiff of my desperation this time last year from this unanswered SO question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23142762/how-to-identify-factors-that-will-help-reproduce-web-rendering-bugs-for-android http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23142762/how-to-identify-... ). Not my problem anymore. Last I heard the new owners are planning to rewrite with more responsive design and using angular. Should be fun.

wldcordeiro 12y ago
It isn't just Android anymore. A project I worked on has been getting a lot of reports of layout issues on iOS for alternate browsers like Chrome. We have no issues with Safari but the alternates seem to throw some wrenches in the system.
- m_mueller 12y ago
  At least these aren't the default on any phone though, so their usage statistics should be relatively low.
- Gustomaximus 12y ago
  The worry with Chrome for me is not that these issues happen, but that they seem to be slow in fixing them. I'd hate to find Google have pulled resource now they have a dominant position in the browser market and will languish in the way older version of IE did.
- cloudwalking 12y ago

Spoom 12y ago

Welcome to my personal hell. Samsung used to be the worst but HTC may have usurped that position. - Cordova-based Android app developer

grrowl 12y ago
I left my last job after management sold a Cordova solution. We didn't have the tech in-house to dev/test, but had already sold it anyway, leading to a death spiral of developer hell as we needed to support Android 4.0.1, our Android test phone was a $30 LG which barely displayed the home screen. iOS worked great — or at least, predictably enough to repro + fix anything we caught.
- joshstrange 12y ago
  > our Android test phone was a $30 LG which barely displayed the home screen Ugh I know this pain, I did some Titanium Appcelerator development for a while and I had the newest iPhone a previous gen to test with but the Android phone was worse than bargain bin. It really skewed my perception of Android and it was hell working with such a shitty device. On top of management wating it to work on super old phones (needs to work "everywhere" and my QA consisted of me with a single phone and a laptop that could barely run the simulator (which was really shitty back then, I've heard it's gotten better). I hated that shit.
lnanek2 12y ago
You can use CrossWalk to ensure you have the same Chrome version across all Android devices. That said, it does make the APK very heavy.

thomasfoster96 12y ago

If you're developing an app for Android that uses WebViews, your best bet is probably to start using Intel's CrossWalk project. At the cost of quite a few dozen megabytes in app size, you get the latest Chrome (well, the latest when you published your app) plus a few of Intel's pet web projects (SIMD, TypedObjects). That said, as annoying as it is that Safari on iOS is slow to pick up new web technologies, atleast I know that the vast majority of iOS users are using a browser updated within the past year, and it's all the same browser engine underneath.

serve_yay 12y ago

Jesus, what a disaster.

cateye 12y ago

I would like to know what behavior is different with some real examples of broken functionality.

RyanMcGreal 12y ago

> Although Google Chrome is installed on all Android 4.3+ devices Is this correct? My phone (Galaxy S3) is running Android 4.4.2 and Play Store tells me I don't have Chrome installed.