There’s a many a browser available for Android, the ability to swap and change whenever you like is one of its main strengths. For many of us – increasingly so, with tablets on the rise – the web browser is where we spend most of our time on our mobile devices. Sure, there’s lots of apps for varied web services, Google+ has an app, Dropbox has an app, lots of websites have apps in the Play Store, too. However, the web browser is still king and still works a lot better than many of them and is a lot more predictable – the settings for your browser apply for every site etc.
Back in Febuary Google released the first beta of its Chrome browser for mobile into the Play Store and it was well received for the most part. To be able to sync tabs across all devices running Chrome is a really nice feature. One that I use often – I’ll start reading a lengthy article at my desk and I’ll finish it on my tablet on the sofa or in bed. The same goes for my phone, I can pick up an article or forum thread that’s open on my desktop anywhere I have data.
However good an app is there’s always foibles here and there, you still can’t download files as I’m aware and at first you were stuck with only being able to view mobile sites a little pointless with a desktop-class browser, no? Issues are continuing to be fixed in updates to the browser over the course of the year and it’s only gotten better if you ask me.
The news that it will come out of beta in the coming weeks is welcome news, I juggle through browsers on my tablet like there’s no tomorrow, if Chrome can nail down and fix the few issues I have with it then I think I’ll have a new default browser. Alot of my friends don’t run Android, a few do, but those that don’t still run Google Chrome, being able to run their browser of choice on their phone may well be a fut in the door for many users. Imagine this example of the average user in the real world:-
“Is that Chrome, on your phone?”
“Sure is buddy”
“What phone is that?”
“It’s an Android phone”
That sends the message ‘I love Chrome, if I get an Android phone I can run it on that, brilliant’. Not only that, but one more killer app in Android’s arsenal certainly can’t be a bad thing now can it?