Rich Mintz  

The day we have all been waiting for is here: Google Chrome has come to iOS, and (more to the point) Apple has permitted it to be released in the App Store.

Like many of the people reading this, I live inside Google Chrome all day on my Mac. I switched from Mac Firefox a long while back (two years?) because it wasn’t stable enough for me. I’ve heard it’s stabler now, but in the meantime I’ve gotten used to the easy customizability of Google Chrome and a lot of little things about it, including the single universal URL/search field. I also live in Google Apps (both personally and on behalf of my employer), which, not coincidentally, integrate well with Chrome.

Until today, I’ve been stuck with Safari on my iPhone and iPad. Ungenerous, perhaps — Safari is a perfectly good browser, roughly comparable (at my level of precision) to Chrome in speed, well implemented on the iDevices (and improved lately on the iPad). But I can’t sync my bookmarks or history, and I’m a tab slob, so I always seem to have random tabs open on every device to “remind me” of something that I then forget about for days or weeks. Not pretty.

Just installed Chrome on my iPhone and it’s glorious. Logging into Chrome everywhere and setting up bookmark and history syncing now and I expect my LIFE WILL CHANGE FOREVER AND EVER!

Unfortunately, unless your iDevice is jailbroken (and I’m not That Sort of Person), it still defaults to Safari when you click a URL. This Safari bookmark magically switches to Chrome and opens the currently-open page in a new tab there. I bet Apple will eventually give in and allow other browsers to serve as the default.

Tags: technofoolery

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2012 at 10:35 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.