I can't properly express how disappointed I am by this release. Chrome on mobile has been a redheaded stepchild for almost a year, with the vague promise that big improvements would be coming once they merged with mainline Chrome. But this new beta version seems to solve absolutely none of the issues that Chrome on Android has been suffering from:<p>- Password sync is still not supported. This is absolutely insane, especially since it's apparently supported by iOS. Typing secure password on a touch keyboard is a total pain, and even more so to do it again for every single device.<p>- The much touted smart resizing of text is still completely broken. It still semi-randomly decides that particular bits of text on a page are unimportant (e.g. due to the paragraph being small) and resize them to an unreadable size. Often these elements are actually the most important ones on a page.<p>- The "zoom + double tap resize text" idiom from just about all other Android browsers (including the original default browser) is still not there, which increases the pain caused by the stupid text resizing algorithms.<p>- The edges of the screen are still wasted on the useless unsymmetric tab switching gestures. Ok, unlike the other things, I didn't seriously expect that this would change. Still a bummer :-(<p>I can't believe Google removed the real browser from Android 4.2 if they're really going to leave Chrome as a cute toy with nothing going for it but a couple of easily demoable features.
OH THANK GOD it looks like document.elementFromPoint finally works.<p>For that matter it looks like clientX and clientY are no longer completely broken if the user, you know, <i>scrolls the page at all.</i><p>I love Chrome to death but this has been an issue since at least March in Chrome Mobile.<p>It's still broken in Chrome Mobile plain, which hasn't been updated since November, but at least its fixed in this Beta.<p><a href="https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117754" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117754</a><p><a href="https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=141840" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=141840</a>
At last, an update from Chrome 18 for mobile... but no word on HTML5 features that the desktop version has like Web Audio API and WebGL. Looks like they're still not supported here.
I tested the webpage <a href="http://m.chromeexperiments.com/" rel="nofollow">http://m.chromeexperiments.com/</a> with chrome and chrome beta on both my Galaxy Nexus and my Nexus 7.
On both devices the new beta feels a lot slower and the Nexus 7 I can't even scroll the index page smoothly using the new version.
Looks like they are finally following through on the promise of aligning the desktop and android versions. But i wonder does it have same html5 support as desktop as well or just a version bump with regular improvements.
How does Dolphin (with Dolphin Jetpack) compare to this version. I remember a post in HN a few weeks back where Dolphin was winning in most benchmarks over Chrome back then.<p>Anyone using Dolphin?
I hope they didn't jump from version 18 all the way to 25 just for naming sake, while keeping it just as slow as before, and that they actually brought all the performance improvements desktop Chrome got between versions 18 and 25.