I can’t believe it has taken such a long time for chrome to appear on the app store for ios. I switched to chrome on all the desktops & laptops a while ago as safari was buggy & a memory hog & Firefox started crashing a lot since they tried to update too much of it.
Chrome on the desktop is great. It syncs all our passwords and bookmarks on all machines, which is a great help when you share hardware like we do. It means that no matter what machine we are using we have all our bookmarks & passwords ready to go.
Now chrome is on ios we share all the same features. You can look at the tabs open on all your machines essentially picking up where you left off, and you can browse all your bookmarks. Granted As of right now Apple does not allow it’s users to specify a custom browser and they don’t allow use of the Turbo Javascript engine that mobile Safari has. But chrome performs very well and if you have Jailbroken (like I have) you can install browser changer from cydia and set chrome as your default. How nice.
To chrome itself, one of the biggest selling points for me is the syncing between my desktop versions and iPad/iPhone versions. It finally gives me a consistent browsing experience across all devices. Saying that, for a first release this is an epic app. They only thing so far I’ve managed to break is a frozen tab, but closing & reopening the tab cleared it right up and the app remained stable.
One of the best features so far is voice search on iPad. Click the microphone icon and speak your search term. As if by magic your search appears in google. Last night I searched for “a list of the best hotels in Amsterdam on trip advisor” and it found the right page with no typos in the search string. I then tested it by saying “how do you get from Manchester to Amsterdam in a car via hull” to which I was presented with a map of the route and a link for P&O ferries for the car crossing from Hull to Rotterdam. I’m impressed. This is a killer addition for me.
Tabbed browsing is snappy & I’ve yet to actually break the browser. Rendering of pages is flawless and overall speeds are good.
By installing browser changer from cydia, and specifying chrome as your default browser (for maps and YouTube also) you receive a seamless integration of chrome into IOS. I’m really excited for the future of this app.
Today it was announced that Google Chrome for IOS is the top app on the app store. It might finally give apple a kick up the arse to develop mobile safari.
Anyway I leave you with a few screenshots of chrome on the iPad. Any questions, fire me a comment, email or tweet me.
