[klausa]

>WebView is now based on Chromium

Does that mean that there will no more be stock 'Browser' app? I refuse to use Chrome on Android because of brain-dead, non-disablable 'font-boosting' that makes (among many others) Hacker News absolutely unusable.

If that means that the same engine is the only one officially supported on 4.4 forwards, then that's really sad and unfortunate.

[chops]

I don't use HN site on Chrome Browser anymore because the app Hacker News 2 is so good: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof...

[manmal]

Shameless plug: My app "HN" has slightly better ratings, but also a reduced feature set: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly...

[jzelinskie]

I've always used this app. The only thing I think that's weird is the default text size. I actually like the fact that you can't post. It probably reduces the amount of times I would make a completely worthless post.

[chinpokomon]

A great start, but until I can post a comment through the app, I can't really "use" it. :-/ I'm looking forward to that future update.

[manmal]

Yeah, it's definitely on the list. Sadly, life often gets in the way when I should have time to spend time on HN. I guess I have too many hobbies..

[devx]

Hacker News 2 is virtually perfect.

[chinpokomon]

I only have three gripes.

First, it removes my paragraph separation when I post. Second, when you go back to the topic list, it repositions the view at the top of the list again.

The third is that when viewing articles, it doesn't use the Chrome rendering engine, so JavaScript demos suffer greatly and I have to relaunch the article in Chrome to see most of the correctly. It sounds like that last point of contention, Google may have just fixed for me.

Personally, I like all the changes that I read about today.

I'd also like to point out that Chrome as the default webview is a natural fit with the direction Google is taking Android. For some time now on Nexus tablets, there has been no Android browser, only Chrome. Also, you can now save "web apps" as applications, not just as bookmarked links. I think it is only natural that by the time Android 5 is released, you might even be able to install Chrome packaged apps just as you do with regular APK applications.

Android and Chrome are merging, and ChromeCast, a lightweight Android kernel that only runs Chrome, is the proving ground.

[what_ever]

Looks great. Any idea why it uses a different font than the one used by Android?

[TsiCClawOfLight]

Really, it is. Use it.

[Symmetry]

Well, there's always Firefox and a whole bunch of other browsers if you don't like Chrome.

[binaryatrocity]

If your not using Firefox on Android, your browser woes are your own fault :D <3 Mozilla

[hbbio]

Apart from Mozilla love, what are the good reasons to use Firefox on Android?

I tried it, found it slower and less responsive than Chrome. But as this is a completely biased feeling, I'd love to know more.

[Spittie]

Those are mine:

* Firefox Sync. As I use Firefox on my desktop, it's nice to keep them synched.

* Addons. I know this might sound stupid on a phone, but having lastpass autofill your passwords on-the-go is awesome.

* Interface. I really like the Firefox Mobile UI, but I hate the Chrome (Tablet, I browse on a Nexus 7) Mobile UI. Chrome get really bad with 3 or 4 tabs, making it really hard to switch tabs, and really easy to close tabs by mistake.

* Smoothness. I find that Firefox is way better/faster than Chrome on my Nexus 7 (This might be because I run Nightly, but I've compared it to Chrome Beta too). Especially, try to open 2 or 3 pages with a video, Chrome just become unusable for 5/10 seconds for me.

* Memory usage. I have a 2012 Nexus 7, and it has "only" 1gb of ram. It seems that if I open more than 5 tabs, Chrome just love dropping old tabs them out of memory. I've yet to have Firefox drop a tab, even with 10 or more tabs open. (It does drop them if I leave it in background and open something memory-intensive, like a game, but that's expected).

[bad_user]

I can second every point @Spittie wrote. I love Firefox for Android.

To be fair to Android Chrome, it also does Sync if you login with your Google Account. It doesn't handle passwords very well though. I also like how Chrome handles clicks on links - so if the link is too small, or if you're hitting two links at the same time, then it shows you a magnified view of the area you've hit, a feature that's very useful on a mobile phone (not so much on a tablet).

But Firefox did improve by leaps and bounds and has unique features that no other mobile browser currently has, like Addons (AdBlock FTW).

[zachlatta]

Having LastPass auto-fill passwords on my phone is indeed awesome. Scrolling feels a little weird on my Nexus 4 though.

[laggyluke]

Are you always signed into LastPass on your phone?

I've got a (simple) screen lock password + full encryption, but I'm still a bit paranoid to keep LastPass signed in. Instead, I have to type my 20+ character passphrase each time I have to use LastPass on my phone, which is frustrating, but not as frustrating as losing all my accounts together with my phone.

[cpeterso]

Firefox for Android supports add-ons like Adblock Plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/adblock-plus/

Firefox for Android also runs on Android 2.2 (Froyo) and later. Chrome only supports Android 4.0 (ICS) and later.

[lambda]

I've recently seen more and more ads on pages in Chrome. Just a few days ago, I got fed up and switched to Firefox (with Ad Block Plus installed), and boy am I glad that I did. There are a few places where I feel it's a little slower, and it occasionally frustrates me with links that are close together as it doesn't have the zoom that Chrome does when you hit a link that's sufficiently close to another link as to be ambiguous. But the lack of ads more than makes up for those shortcomings. I've come to realize that I just cannot live without ad blocking any more.

And yes, I do realize that advertising pays for many of the services that I use. It's just that the advertising arms race always makes it more and more intrusive until it's unbearable; I just cannot put up with them. Those services that I value and which offer a subscription plan instead of ads I subscribe to (like LWN). Sadly there's not a lot of content that you can actually choose to pay for rather than receiving via ads, so I just use an ad blocker and move on.

[socillion]

Sync is one good reason if you're already using desktop Firefox.

I had problems using Firefox on a stock Android Nexus 4 (bugs with selecting text and freezing when scrolling) but it's been a flawless experience after switching to Cyanogen. I'm at a loss to explain the difference.

[jimworm]

I use Firefox on Android for its proxy settings, so I can SSH tunnel out of China.

[ahomescu1]

Performance depends on the hardware, it seems. On my dual-core+1GB RAM tablet (a Nook HD), Firefox is visibly faster than Chrome (to the point where the latter is almost unusable). On my N4, they're about the same.

[Fundlab]

Adobe Flash Player

[icebraining]

Firefox does the same.

[judk]

Firefox also has broken font-boosting

[klausa]

I just tried it, and it's even worse. While it doesn't do anything as brain-damaged as font boosting (at least not on HN), I uninstalled it after 45 seconds when I saw what it does to fonts. I don't care what it does wrong, but fonts definitely look different than on the whole OS and just generally bad. I know that getting this thing quite right isn't easy, but holy hell, is it annoying.

I'm too lazy for this shit. If there's no popular, working, desktop-class browser available for this platform, then, sincerely, fuck this shit, my next phone is iPhone, thank you very much.

[lstamour]

The font-boosting has tons of known bugs: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list?q=Cr=Blink-Te...

Once that list gets shorter, it's slated for inclusion in Webkit, though. It's a useful feature if it works consistently. Prevents needless scrolling from side-to-side on tiny screens. (It's a lot less useful on my 21" Android Slate, however)

[Recoil42]

A lesson to developers here: Don't include a feature before it's ready, even if you think it's really cool.

[andybak]

It seems to have become much less annoying in the Chrome beta. Have you tried it recently?

[klausa]

I just did, following your suggestion. Unfortunately, it's still the same unusable garbage.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rnl8m9ioi9ric5v/2013-10-31%2020.04... - latest chrome beta (release looks absolutely identical) https://www.dropbox.com/s/867wrehnqsiu3oc/2013-10-31%2020.04... - CM10.1.3 stock browser

[vladgur]

I dont think news.ycombinator.com is that usable on iphone either. I use ihackernews.com for 98% of my HN browsing. Try it on your phone.

[king_jester]

> Does that mean that there will no more be stock 'Browser' app? I refuse to use Chrome on Android because of brain-dead, non-disablable 'font-boosting' that makes (among many others) Hacker News absolutely unusable.

WebView is the UI class for displaying webpages as a native Android view. The Browser app contains much more than the WebView class itself.

[keeperofdakeys]

Nexus devices have shipped with Chrome instead of the stock browser for quite a while. However being Chromium, it'll probably be included in AOSP sources, so I'm unsure if they'll stick with Browser or make a Chromium. If it is a Chromium app, there are chances that it will be less bloated, as I don't think they opensourced the Chrome Android UI/enhancements.

[atomi]

On the subject of Chrome on Android, why can't we have a permanent desktop view option?

[kolistivra]

I'm not sure you mean exactly this but, it's added recently: https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/installtoho...

[zobzu]

ironically firefox is probably the best android browser right now. why not just use that?

[pbz]

I use Opera for this reason alone.