[lucb1e]

Use Firefox.

Why? Chrome isn't open source, if you care about that kind of thing. And personal preference also.

[jonknee]

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/AndroidBuildInstruct...

[gress]

That's not chrome.

[azernik]

It is very very close: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoo...

tl;dr: Chromium is Chrome minus:

1. Crash/usage reporting to Google.

2. Proprietary video format support

3. Embedded Flash implementation (which doesn't exist on mobile anyway).

4. Google API keys.

If what you care about is security auditability, that's pretty good. If you care about running only open source software, that's going to be very hard to do in the Android/Google-Play ecosystem.

[gcb0]

> If you care about running only open source software, that's going to be very hard to do in the Android/Google-Play ecosystem.

yet, the main advertisement google trhows for android is "open source" "community driven" yadda yadda

[azernik]

Main advertisement? I just went to android.com and developer.android.com; android.com advertises "Google built in" and lots of platforms, with a very small link to AOSP at the bottom of the page; developer.android.com has an AOSP link buried in its menus.

[gcb0]

oh sorry. advertised.

we have already been baited and switched. but marketing takes a long time to dissipate...

here, i just clicked 2010 and clicked a random day for android.com

http://web.archive.org/web/20100112200506/http://www.android...

the 1st block is about the nexus one (market as open, but not on this page) and look! the second item on the page reads "Access to the entire platform source and information on how to contribute."

guess they forgot an asterix there saying that the "entire platform" means some of the platform.

[gress]

It's been years since Google switched away from that claim.

[scintill76]

I believe only Chrome has built-in PDF viewing too, which can be nice. The page you linked has people saying there are Chromium plugins for it, or you can install a dedicated PDF viewer and it will probably embed itself in the browser when downloading PDFs.

[kretor]

No longer true. The PDF viewer's been open-sourced a couple months ago. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7781878

[scintill76]

Cool! Thanks.

[cpeterso]

> 3. Embedded Flash implementation (which doesn't exist on mobile anyway).

Firefox for Android still supports Adobe's Flash plugin for Android.

[fastest963]

I've built it using these instructions before and it's not that difficult at all.

[andor]

Is the Android chrome (in the UI sense) now open source as well? If that is the case, we could finally get the option to disable third-party-cookies...

[gcb0]

open source.

has extensions.

allows you to control the web, where chrome allows google to control the web for you (e.g. no way to disable referrer for one thing)

[thejdude]

That, and you can actually turn off third-party cookies.

There's absolutely NO reason you should have them on, and I've been surfing the web just fine this way for 15 years.