Chrome For Android Beta Released, Torments Gingerbread Users

It’s been blogged about, hinted at, and begged for, and now finally it’s here: today Google has released Chrome for Android. Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t run on your phone. In a move that’s more disappointing than surprising, Chrome for Android currently only works on phones and tablets running Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich”, the latest release of the mobile OS and naturally the version that runs on the fewest devices.

Even in this early release, Chrome for Android has many of the features that have made it’s desktop counterpart one of the fastest growing browsers in history:

Features:

• Browse fast with accelerated page loading, scrolling, and zooming
• Search and navigate directly from the omnibox
• Open and switch between unlimited tabs in an easy-to-view stack
• Sign in to Chrome to sync your bookmarks and view tabs you have open on your computer
• Send pages from desktop Chrome to your smartphone or tablet with one click and read them on the go, even if you’re offline
• Browse privately in Incognito mode

Whether the ICS limitation is due to some new features and capabilities built into ICS, or if Google simply wants to make sure the Chrome Beta is running on the best of the best hardware, has yet to be seen. Though I have no doubt that the folks over at places like XDA will be looking into that issue very closely. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a hack for using Chrome on Gingerbread within the week, though at this point it’s just conjecture.

Limitations

While early reviews for the Chrome Beta have been overwhelmingly positive, there are a few limitations that users have been pretty vocal about so far. The first, and perhaps most perplexing, is the fact that you can’t view pages as if you were on a desktop browser…even though you are. For whatever reason, there isn’t an option to set Chrome’s user-agent string to that of a desktop browser, a feature which has been available in other Android browsers (such as Dolphin) for years. This is a pretty big omission, and seems to negate much of the reasoning for using Chrome on your phone or tablet.

Chrome for Android also doesn’t support Adobe Flash, though that isn’t much of a surprise. Adobe has made it pretty clear that Flash on mobile is a dead project, and there are no plans to continue development of it. Hopefully it won’t be too long before HTML5 finally takes over and we can forget about the days when websites actually required the Flash plugin.

Finally, Chrome for Android doesn’t actually replace the stock browser, it is simply another option. Some users may be unhappy about this, as having two browsers (especially if one is wildly superior to the other) is pretty unnecessary for most people. However, my readings on this subject previously have lead me to believe that WebKit is so tightly wound into Android that completely replacing the stock browser or even updating it (outside of a full ROM update) is impractical. So until Chrome for Android becomes stable enough to completely replace the stock browser, it’s going to have to be an addon.

The Verdict

If you have a device that can run it, by all means head over to the Android Market and grab this beta release. The addition of desktop sync and intuitive tabbed browsing alone make this worthy of a look, and hopefully future updates will bring it even closer to the desktop browser we all know and love.

While you’re at it, you’ll probably want to head over to the Chrome Web Store and grab “Chrome to Mobile Beta“, which enables the functionality “Chrome to Phone” gave the stock browser in Android 2.2 “Froyo”.