Most of the non-Nexus phones technically have a locked bootloader, so that people can only run firmware signed by the carrier. In practice, there are ways of jailbreaking the vast majority of locked phones, but there are some people who don't want to void their warranty or don't want to use community ROMs.
AFAIK (and some google searching seems to confirm) the Galaxy SII does not have a locked bootloader. I believe that the original Galaxy S was also unlocked.
So which Samsung Android devices have locked bootloaders?
Motorola and HTC tend to lock their bootloaders more often (though this situation is improving).
I'm so sorry, I was incorrect. I briefly owned a Nexus S which had an unlocked bootloader. I currently own a Motorola Photon, and even though there are ways to flash the bootloader, doing so cripples 4g (I believe this is by design).
It's using 4.0 APIs, according to Matt Seigler's story and interview with Google SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai:
"Back to the bad news: some of the more advanced features of Chrome for Android require APIs found only in Ice Cream Sandwich, so the team made the call to make it only available for Android 4.0 and beyond. Again, this means only 1% of current Android users out there can actually get and use the browser right now."
- http://parislemon.com/post/17215781807/chrome-for-android-th...
1% of Android users is still at least a couple million. That's more than enough to get a reasonable pool of beta testers. By the time it gets out of beta, the Android release distribution will probably look quite different.
I don't believe the iOS sandboxing would allow for V8, though. Isn't this the same problem as "my third party app WebView is slow because it doesn't support Javascript JIT"?
You are right, it wont allow V8. The only app allowed to JIT on iOS 4.3+ is Safari (before 4.3 not even Safari was allowed to modify it's own code).
It is technically part of the Mandatory Code Signing trusted computing implementation of iOS more than of the Sandbox. They use the dirty bit normally used to do Copy on Write to re-verify signatures when dirty executable memory is paged in.
We've been user "Browser", I hope one advantage of using Chrome would be bookmark sync with my desktop browser. "Browser" doesn't even have folders for it's bookmarks.
Anyway, my phone only runs Android 2.3 so it seems I'll have to wait till my next upgrade to avoid using hacked up apps to sync my bookmarks.
IIRC, Browser's sync is just bookmarks. Chrome for Android also syncs open tabs and autocomplete suggestions from the desktop, bringing closer to Firefox Sync.
I've never seen any chart or graph where Firefox Mobile even shows up. Usually when something has <1% marketshare it gets categorized as statistically insignificant or grouped in "other".
It's still not nobody. And having Firefox playing a significant role will prevent situation which existed in the past where many sites were "IE only". We don't need "WebKit only" sites.
There is a difference between "WebKit only", which means you have to support some N number of standards (CSS 1/2/3 for example) and "IE only" sites, where you have to run Windows and support ActiveX.
There are enough WebKit browsers specific things which are not standard to make "WebKit only" situation a problem. In general, well balanced browsers representation makes web developers think better and be more responsible.
Do you have evidence that they are correctly detecting Firefox Mobile? In my day-to-day use, I've seen it treated as everything from desktop Firefox to Mobile Safari, so I'm not terribly optimistic on that point.
I do. Deafault browser is slow, the Aurora builds for Firefox have been the fastest option I've found so far on my GNEX.
But if Chrome beta is faster I'll use it. On mobile it's all about speed for me!
Firefox for android unfortunately started out real slow...might be a good move for Google. Time to go to xda-developers and see if it'll be on your phone.
Decoupling the browser from the OS is one of the best things that could happen for android security going forward. While it won't help people who can't get upgrades to ICS, at least it will solve the future problems of people who get stuck on 4.x while their OS browser slowly becomes more and more exploitable. I have one phone that is still on 2.2 - it is trivially easy to own the phone with a little bit of javascript on any web page.
Probably automatic, like all their other apps on Android. But you should be able to easily turn that off just like with all the other apps in the Market.
I think only the market is automatically updated, everything else is opt-in like 3rd party apps, but you can now set your default to be auto-update, unless permissions change.
Decoupling the browser from the OS is one of the best things that could happen for android security going forward.
Decoupling everything but the most rudimentary services is the best way forward for both security and user satisfaction. Despite the laser focus on the underlying operating system version by so many, tens of millions of Android users, across makes, models, and carriers, are seeing endless updates of mapping and navigation, the search functionality, the mail applications, the Android market, and so on. Decoupling the browser adds it into the bin of "no longer need to care about the underlying OS much", and goes a long way to make the fragmentation issue a non-issue.
If the core services are going to be different then the fragmentation is still a problem for app developers. May be not so much for the end users but I guess the end users don't care as much.
Not everyone will update frequently or would want things to get updated for them without them knowing it. Certainly not the non-techy users. This makes it a pain to account for all different versions of browsers, OS, resolution and other functionality a pain.
The real problem here is Android's inability to update what are considered 'OS components' independently of updating the OS. Ideally, the built-in browser (which should really just be Chrome) can be updated just like other apps can. Having a built-in browser and also Chrome for Android seems like it would confuse users, and not have the desired security impact you describe because it needs users to search for, install the browser and use it instead of the built-in version.
Google can update apps independently of the OS. Youtube, Gmail, Maps, Market - are all updated independently of the OS ever since Froyo.
They will eventually replace the stock browser with Chrome, but they're waiting until it's not beta anymore, and until ICS has bigger marketshare, or maybe they'll just make it the default browser starting with Android 5.0.
Opera Mobile is awesome. It feels so much faster than the stock browser. I recommend it to anyone stuck on 2.2/2.3 for the foreseeable future (like me).
Exploit needs to be able to determine the exact path + filename of any file to be stolen.
The securityfocus.com entry referenced above includes a demo script implementing the exploit if you want to see the details.
Just wrap the XHR requests to the local URIs in a try/catch and go fishing for filenames of interest within standard directories.
As mentioned in Cannon's original article, photos would be an easy target given the common location plus filename format for the jpg files
(e.g., /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/IMG_yyyymmdd_hhmmss.jpg). Another interesting directory to poke around in would be /sdcard/Android/data/com.dropbox.android/files/scratch/.
I tweaked the demo script a bit and was able to steal my own dropbox files and photos on my junky little LG Optimus V on Android 2.2.1. Good Times.
Nothing is stopping you from using another browser right now.
There are not that many browsers to choose from, but you could for instance download Opera Mobile - the next time you open a link you will be asked which browser you want to use. You should also be able to replace the browser on your home screen, although how easy it is might depend on what kind of launcher you have.
Assuming that means "be able to run Dalvik bytecode in the browser", that doesn't help with all the Android APIs and such, so it's hard to see how it would be useful.
Perhaps it means porting the Dalvik VM to ChromeOS. I've wondered the same thing, since putting an Android layer on ChromeOS seems to be technically viable (if non-trivial).
It is very phone specific for ICS right now. When Cyanogen 9 comes out there will be more 'standardization.' For now, I'd look up the dev forum for your phone on xda-developers and see if there are any good options.
Definitely CynanogenMod. Probably (I haven't checked them all) the most complete and best testet Rom out there. Available for nearly every major Android hardware.
I ran 4.0 via Cyanogenmod 9 on my Nexus S 4G for weeks, and unfortunately the bugs and constant app crashes got so bad that, as much as it pained me to do so, I went back to 2.3 yesterday. I love Android 4.0, but there doesn't seem to be a good, stable implementation of it yet.
Example issues:
* Random reboots
* Choppy playback in the Music app
(Amazon MP3 worked fine)
* Random app crashes, particularly
games (possibly due to lack of official
4.0 support)
* Poor GPS performance, occasionally taking
15-20 minutes to acquire a position (typically
solved more quickly by rebooting, but it takes
several minutes to know there's a problem in the
first place)
It's difficult to blame the app crashes on the OS if the app doesn't claim to officially support 4.0, but that's still reason enough to wait.
I'm eagerly awaiting the day that CM9 is released, or MIUI releases their official 4.0 version, but until then I think it's better to stick with what works.
In my experience, the stability and performance of various peripherals like GPS and the WiMax radio are about as good as the stock 2.3 ROM. I haven't even noticed a change in battery drain...
I've had ICS on my Nexus S for a few months now and I've not seen issues like that. I'm just using the standard Google image (AFAIK, my brother did the upgrade for me - Android 4.0.3, kernel 3.0.8-gb55e9ac). I do see a lot of battery drain when I'm using the GPS, and I don't play games, but no crashes.
Same here, I bought into the Nexus One hype, great phone but without ICS we are left high and dry with an expensive paperweight with regards to something like Chrome on ICS.
Unfortunately, because of shortsightedness from both Google and HTC (HTC mostly), phones back then only had like 450 MB internal storage, and from that only 250 MB were for the OS itself.
This means an ICS install would be severely limited by the hardware (I think a full ICS install is significantly bigger). Modders might be able to put ICS on it by cutting apps and features, or doing other kinds of hacks to extend the internal storage, but for Google that just wasn't worth it.
I would really blame HTC for this. Pretty much all of their phones throughout 2010 were like that. It was my main frustration with HTC at the time, another one being the weak Adreno 200 GPU.
This is common Google strategy. They are trying to build the future and pre-ICS devices are not the future. So they get shafted. Google may make unhappy customers this way, but they can move a lot faster than companies like Microsoft, who support everything back two decades or so sometimes.
I would not call iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G "robust": it was more of a disaster than anything. There are obviously strengths to all sides here, and I don't mean to champion that Google's is best or the only way. But I think it's clear what they're doing, and I'd bet they've weighed all possible options and found this to be the most economically sensible one.
I honestly thought Apple's behaviour with the 3G was shameful. I wouldn't have minded if they hadn't released the update for the 3G, but instead what they effectively did was brick a load of people's phones and then offer poor options for downgrading. It's really not what I expect from a premium brand.
The inability to run a handful of hardware dependent features on iOS is not even in the same ballpark as the complete lack of timely updates for over 95% of Android users.
There's a difference between running and running as well as on the 4S. The demo of noise reduction is impressive.
http://www.audience.com/demos/transmit-noise-en.php [audience.com]
It's easy to see why with that noise reduction, Siri would be much more accurate than without it, in real scenarios.
Apple obviously wants Siri to be judged on it's best performance. They have a reputation for quality to maintain.
this is a bad analogy, apple does not backport features to old versions of their OS, they put their new OS on old handsets. google puts their new OS onto old devices as much as they can too, the problem is that the carriers and other handset manufacturers don't. i'm sure google would love if everything would start running ICS, but it's not their responsibility.
Let's not guess what he would say. But blaming Linus for that is like the Iranian government blaming a dev because someone used his upload app to upload porn pictures or people blaming gun makers instead of killers. You can do it but it isn't the smartest thing to do to say the least IMO.
But to be fair, everyone gets a cheap phone every two years, so what's 1% today will be 100% in two years. Remember, the G1 is three-ish years old, and it's mostly gone now. The Nexus One was released on January 5, 2010, and so only the earliest of early adopters (with a standard contract) are just now gaining the ability to upgrade.
Two years is a long time, but if IE 6 went away after two years, we wouldn't even remember that it was once a thing :)
Apple doesn't allow applications to provide their own runtimes:
“3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple’s built-in WebKit framework.”
That's not very precise. Legally, Apple doesn't allow to use iOS SDK, i.e. to build such applications. If you manage somehow to build it any other way (not using Apple's SDK), this restriction has no meaning, and while Apple could reject such kind of software from their app store, you could deploy it to alternatives, like Cydia, and still be legal, since you didn't violate any licenses.
I.e. for browsers makers the concern is not that they'll be rejected from the app store, but that they can't even legally build them with the Apple's SDK.
The rule above is not from the App Store guidelines, but from the SDK license. I.e. even if you use alternative app store without restrictions (Cydia), but build a browser with Apple iOS SDK - it's still illegal, and that's why major browsers like Firefox wouldn't do it.
I'd say it's a very ugly practice, to use development tools license to ban competition. It's like saying buying this chisel you are bound to only carve logos of the chisel making company.
I think it will be a matter of time until the iOS platform (3-5 years) is more akin to that of the Mac platform, where there is a walled garden app store, and an outside ecosystem as well. Buying from the walled garden will have many advantages, so it will thrive, but having the ability to buy apps from other locations will enable the platform to also stay competitive.
Too bad it's only available in "select countries", which certainly don't include the Netherlands... Probably just the US and Canada? Kind of old-fashioned.
"With hardware-accelerated canvas, overflow scroll support, strong HTML5 video support, and new capabilities such as Indexed DB, WebWorkers and Web Sockets, Chrome for Android is a solid platform for developing web content on mobile devices."
"Much of the code for Chrome for Android is already shared with Chromium and over the coming weeks, the Chromium team will be upstreaming many new components developed for Chrome for Android to Chromium, WebKit and other projects."
"Chrome for Android is derived from Chromium. Because of the ICS release timeframes, we haven’t started the open sourcing process until recently. New capabilities added for Chrome for Android will be open sourced in phases, by upstreaming components of it into Chromium, WebKit, and other projects, while maintaining the integrity of those projects."
I'm rather confused that Google seems to be aiming to fragment the browser market for its own platform. I already wasn't looking forward to supporting/testing both Browser and Firefox on Android... Is Google just this disorganized internally?
Chrome and the old Android browser are both based on WebKit. Google will almost certainly make Chrome the default browser for new editions of Android, and will likely push for it on IOS and Windows phone.
The license doesn't allow a different browser on iOS unless it uses Apple's Webkit anyway. Opera Mini was a technical exception. Every other browser is Safari, just with a different chrome.
Unless you think Google can negotiate exceptions to Apple's and Microsoft's respective store rules (or, more impressively, convince them to change the rules), we're not going to see Chrome for iOS or Windows Phone anytime soon (if ever).
I've been hearing that the browser in Android is kinda bad from a lot of web/js developers. I hope that this makes the situation more palatable. Even better is when they'll ship a version for Windows Phone and ios.
I wouldn't hold my breath for Chrome on iOS or Windows Phone. In both cases, the app store rules ban key features of Chrome (like the V8 JavaScript engine).
Google may well do something to address Windows Phone and/or iOS users, but it will probably be much closer to Firefox Home for iOS (which lets you explore your bookmarks, open tabs and history and then follow links in Mobile Safari) than it will be to Chrome for Android.
According to MG Siegler, Chrome is in the bizdev-required proprietary 'with Google' part of Android, not the Open Source part.
http://parislemon.com/post/17215781807/chrome-for-android-th...
That means we're stuck with legacy browsers in existing Androids and in the non-Google-blessed world (Amazon Fire and the billion Chinese phones and tablets).
Interesting. The chromium blog post linked above mentions upstreaming a bunch of new components, so maybe it will be like the Chrome/Chromium situation? Here's hoping...
Why in the world is this restricted? I live in the Netherlands, and I really don't get what's so hard about releasing here. Sure, we're a small market, so not as important, but still... Software is global, man!
Why are they even bothering with h.264 anymore? Didn't they want to remove it from Chrome since like version 10? It's about time they start to aggressively push for WebM, if it's ready.
It would be odd, at the very least, if the problem was H.264 licensing. "All" Android devices (dating back to the G1, I believe) ship with H.264. That doesn't mean there isn't some other licensing (or other legal) sticking point, though.
It insta-crashed for me too on my Samsung Fascinate with CM9. I cleared the app's data, its cache, uninstalled it and reinstalled it. It works like a dream now.
I think is the death knell for ChromeOS. Android browser has always sucked, it was the primary reason I haven't bought an Android device. Google had the resources to make Chrome on Android a long time ago, so I presume they were dragging their feet in a "wait and see" approach for whether ChromeOS had any chance on its own.
First off, this took so long because Chrome was built using a "normal" devel framework (gcc, make, etc) with a few added tools (repo, gyp). The UX for Chrome is provided via OS-specific graphical APIs, like X.org, Cocoa, and Win32.
Android uses a Java framework, which in turn contains the code that manages all rendering and UX, so not only did Chrome UX needed to be ported to Android's graphical API, but the entire build environment needed to be JDK compatible.
I agree the Android browser is laughable compared to Chrome, and Chrome on Android is the future, but there were so many developmental problems that needed to be solved first before one could stick to the other.
Regarding your ChromeOS comment, this has nothing to do with that as ChromeOS is designed to solve an entirely different problem. Many power-users (developers, technology bloggers, etc) seem to have a hate-on for ChromeOS because they're afraid it'll kill their venerable laptop. That will never happen. :)
ChromeOS is designed to kill those netbooks and laptops where common-users (my wife, for example) only use them for browsing gmail, facebook, and a few forums. 95% of what these users do are web based, barring a few native apps, of which NaCL and other HTML5 technologies are aiming to solve.
I believe Transformer Prime and Xoom have it right now. Also the $79 Ainol Novo7 tablet.
They never said they will put it off until JellyBean. The only semi-official rumor about JellyBean was that they post-poned some "major changes" that were coming to ICS initially.
I was hardly using my Touchpad before I put CM9 on it. Now it really is quite delightful to use. Really looking forward to hardware accelerated video though.
My ASUS Slider is supposed to be getting the update quite soon along with the Transformer. Last I read a couple weeks ago it was in final checks at Google.
I've been running a build of CyanogenMod 9 on my Galaxy Tab 10, and I'm absolutely loving it. I really liked the tablet with honeycomb, but ICS has made it literally 10 times better and faster.
Who needs an "official" ICS? I've installed a beta ICS ROM (teamDRH) on my Viewsonic gTablet and it is as tabletized as honeycomb, though it looks better (this build has issues, but developer support is pretty impressive). The best Viewsonic could do as an update was a Froyo-based bugfix release.
Besides, people who have installed custom ROMs on their phone/tablet are likely less worried about using alpha/beta software, so I wouldn't be surprised if most of the early beta testers will be from this group.
Trying it now. It's very slick. Neat little animations and effects all over. Pulling up tabs from my Desktop Chrome works great. All of my bookmarks show up. No extension support (yet?).
239 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadOnly available for ICS https://market.android.com/details?id=com.android.chrome
So which Samsung Android devices have locked bootloaders?
Motorola and HTC tend to lock their bootloaders more often (though this situation is improving).
a) the only operating system that really competes with iOS while everyone struggle to compete with the iPhone
b) mountains of cash
c) a factory full of smart people solving much harder problems
It's much better to just abandon every single generation of Android and the hardware it shipped on!
"Back to the bad news: some of the more advanced features of Chrome for Android require APIs found only in Ice Cream Sandwich, so the team made the call to make it only available for Android 4.0 and beyond. Again, this means only 1% of current Android users out there can actually get and use the browser right now." - http://parislemon.com/post/17215781807/chrome-for-android-th...
It is technically part of the Mandatory Code Signing trusted computing implementation of iOS more than of the Sandbox. They use the dirty bit normally used to do Copy on Write to re-verify signatures when dirty executable memory is paged in.
It's similar in size to Firefox, which obviously has to bundle its own Gecko rendering engine.
Anyway, my phone only runs Android 2.3 so it seems I'll have to wait till my next upgrade to avoid using hacked up apps to sync my bookmarks.
I bet that web augmentation on mobiles can be really huge.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201101-...
http://www.netmarketshare.com/mobile-market-share
O.
> There will be the same 6-week release cycle for new versions, Pinchai says.
http://parislemon.com/post/17215781807/chrome-for-android-th...
but i would ask will they be automatic or manual?
Decoupling everything but the most rudimentary services is the best way forward for both security and user satisfaction. Despite the laser focus on the underlying operating system version by so many, tens of millions of Android users, across makes, models, and carriers, are seeing endless updates of mapping and navigation, the search functionality, the mail applications, the Android market, and so on. Decoupling the browser adds it into the bin of "no longer need to care about the underlying OS much", and goes a long way to make the fragmentation issue a non-issue.
Not everyone will update frequently or would want things to get updated for them without them knowing it. Certainly not the non-techy users. This makes it a pain to account for all different versions of browsers, OS, resolution and other functionality a pain.
They will eventually replace the stock browser with Chrome, but they're waiting until it's not beta anymore, and until ICS has bigger marketshare, or maybe they'll just make it the default browser starting with Android 5.0.
http://thomascannon.net/blog/2010/11/android-data-stealing-v...
http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-480...
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/48256/info
Exploit needs to be able to determine the exact path + filename of any file to be stolen. The securityfocus.com entry referenced above includes a demo script implementing the exploit if you want to see the details. Just wrap the XHR requests to the local URIs in a try/catch and go fishing for filenames of interest within standard directories. As mentioned in Cannon's original article, photos would be an easy target given the common location plus filename format for the jpg files (e.g., /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/IMG_yyyymmdd_hhmmss.jpg). Another interesting directory to poke around in would be /sdcard/Android/data/com.dropbox.android/files/scratch/. I tweaked the demo script a bit and was able to steal my own dropbox files and photos on my junky little LG Optimus V on Android 2.2.1. Good Times.
There are not that many browsers to choose from, but you could for instance download Opera Mobile - the next time you open a link you will be asked which browser you want to use. You should also be able to replace the browser on your home screen, although how easy it is might depend on what kind of launcher you have.
Assuming that means "be able to run Dalvik bytecode in the browser", that doesn't help with all the Android APIs and such, so it's hard to see how it would be useful.
Perhaps it means porting the Dalvik VM to ChromeOS. I've wondered the same thing, since putting an Android layer on ChromeOS seems to be technically viable (if non-trivial).
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
Example issues:
It's difficult to blame the app crashes on the OS if the app doesn't claim to officially support 4.0, but that's still reason enough to wait.I'm eagerly awaiting the day that CM9 is released, or MIUI releases their official 4.0 version, but until then I think it's better to stick with what works.
Edit: Formatting.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1364221
In my experience, the stability and performance of various peripherals like GPS and the WiMax radio are about as good as the stock 2.3 ROM. I haven't even noticed a change in battery drain...
This means an ICS install would be severely limited by the hardware (I think a full ICS install is significantly bigger). Modders might be able to put ICS on it by cutting apps and features, or doing other kinds of hacks to extend the internal storage, but for Google that just wasn't worth it.
I would really blame HTC for this. Pretty much all of their phones throughout 2010 were like that. It was my main frustration with HTC at the time, another one being the weak Adreno 200 GPU.
"Future Proofing" a phone is difficult, because a manufacture needs to overspec the phone whilst still keeping it at a reasonable price.
HTC is notorious for underspecing storage on their phones. Other manufactures do not have the same problem.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1411429
The inability to run a handful of hardware dependent features on iOS is not even in the same ballpark as the complete lack of timely updates for over 95% of Android users.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57371624-264/why-apples-a5...
However, I do agree that Google needs to sort the 'update problem'.
It's one thing to "work" in the hacking sense, and another to "work properly" in the Apple sense.
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2656999&cid=38...
There's a difference between running and running as well as on the 4S. The demo of noise reduction is impressive. http://www.audience.com/demos/transmit-noise-en.php [audience.com] It's easy to see why with that noise reduction, Siri would be much more accurate than without it, in real scenarios.
Apple obviously wants Siri to be judged on it's best performance. They have a reputation for quality to maintain.
You make it sound like Google's suddenly found themselves in these unfortunate circumstances through no fault of their own.
On the contrary, this is the reality of Android. You don't get to own the pluses of being "open" and not own the minuses.
Actually you can, you wouldn't blame Linus because your linux based router comes with a broken or old version of linux.
Two years is a long time, but if IE 6 went away after two years, we wouldn't even remember that it was once a thing :)
Of course, that was because they disbanded the browser team after crushing Netscape.
“3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple’s built-in WebKit framework.”
I.e. for browsers makers the concern is not that they'll be rejected from the app store, but that they can't even legally build them with the Apple's SDK.
I'm guessing it's a localization issue. Although for a Beta, I don't see why they can't just offer everyone who's keen to try it the en-us version.
EDIT: Looks potential: http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/deeper-look-at-chrome-for-a...
"With hardware-accelerated canvas, overflow scroll support, strong HTML5 video support, and new capabilities such as Indexed DB, WebWorkers and Web Sockets, Chrome for Android is a solid platform for developing web content on mobile devices."
http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium/chromium.git;a=tr...
"Much of the code for Chrome for Android is already shared with Chromium and over the coming weeks, the Chromium team will be upstreaming many new components developed for Chrome for Android to Chromium, WebKit and other projects."
"Chrome for Android is derived from Chromium. Because of the ICS release timeframes, we haven’t started the open sourcing process until recently. New capabilities added for Chrome for Android will be open sourced in phases, by upstreaming components of it into Chromium, WebKit, and other projects, while maintaining the integrity of those projects."
Google may well do something to address Windows Phone and/or iOS users, but it will probably be much closer to Firefox Home for iOS (which lets you explore your bookmarks, open tabs and history and then follow links in Mobile Safari) than it will be to Chrome for Android.
http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/deeper-look-at-chrome-for-a...
Sundar, SVP of Chrome just said "We are working hard to bring this to more countries and should greatly expand within the next three months."
Too bad, it instacrashes om my ICS GalaxyS
First off, this took so long because Chrome was built using a "normal" devel framework (gcc, make, etc) with a few added tools (repo, gyp). The UX for Chrome is provided via OS-specific graphical APIs, like X.org, Cocoa, and Win32.
Android uses a Java framework, which in turn contains the code that manages all rendering and UX, so not only did Chrome UX needed to be ported to Android's graphical API, but the entire build environment needed to be JDK compatible.
I agree the Android browser is laughable compared to Chrome, and Chrome on Android is the future, but there were so many developmental problems that needed to be solved first before one could stick to the other.
Regarding your ChromeOS comment, this has nothing to do with that as ChromeOS is designed to solve an entirely different problem. Many power-users (developers, technology bloggers, etc) seem to have a hate-on for ChromeOS because they're afraid it'll kill their venerable laptop. That will never happen. :)
ChromeOS is designed to kill those netbooks and laptops where common-users (my wife, for example) only use them for browsing gmail, facebook, and a few forums. 95% of what these users do are web based, barring a few native apps, of which NaCL and other HTML5 technologies are aiming to solve.
It doesn't look like they allow extensions yet. :(
Big win: You can remotely debug your web application via usb and adb. (Preferences -> Developer Tools -> Enable USB Web debugging.
What tablets have official ICS on them? Is ICS even fully tabletized? I thought they had said they were putting that off until Jelly Bean.
They never said they will put it off until JellyBean. The only semi-official rumor about JellyBean was that they post-poned some "major changes" that were coming to ICS initially.
Besides, people who have installed custom ROMs on their phone/tablet are likely less worried about using alpha/beta software, so I wouldn't be surprised if most of the early beta testers will be from this group.