This blog is just a re-post of what's on the mailing list and does not add anything worthwhile. Here is the original source: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-August/01...

In fact it detracts from the mail with a misleading title.

I would love it if this synced your chrome profile with your phone, so my bookmarks were present on my mobile. Also it would be cool if it tried to match your apps and extensions to possible chrome mobile extensions and sync those as well...come on chrome team!

Honeycomb already does Chrome sync, logic would say that it'll show up in ICS on phones as well.

Well, Firefox Mobile does sync bookmarks & history. But I think most mobile devices are still limited enough you can't really run a full-featured browser and get good performance -- thus the current lack of a direct Chrome port on Android.[1]

Trying to 'sync' extensions between two radically different apps probably isn't worth the headaches it would cause... even an auto-suggest would probably mess up enough to be annoying.

[1] And, despite this article's headline, that doesn't seem to have been announced.

Hopefully, we can move to having Browser be a separately-installable app, like Gmail, Maps, YouTube, etc. I would love to have it updated as often as Chrome is on the desktop, and independently of the OS version.

Yeah, it would be a huge win for security as well. Users will not be at the mercy of their hardware vendor to provide an n-1 OS update that may or may not address all security issues.

Also, as petegrif mentioned below if this means Android browser getting NaCl and extensions support - that would open up lot of new possibilities.

So what does this really mean? As far as I understand it they've just cleaned up their build process a bit.

I hope that it means that the Android Browser starts rendering as well as Chrome on the Desktop. They are much more different browsers, at this point, than you'd expect. (Granted, my only experience has been the Android Browser on the Galaxy Tab we just purchased.) For instance, CSS transforms have artifacts, 3D CSS transforms aren't hardware accelerated, strange z-index and focus bugs, and more. I'd imagine more equivalence with desktop Chrome would straighten some of these out.

I'm trying to make sense of this myself, but it seems as if the seperate Android WebKit project is no longer necessary as there is enough code in common to justify a Chrome port to the Android platform (similar to Linux/Windows/Mac ports). This gives added benefits of layout rendering being more in sync with Chromium. I'm hoping it paves the way for more Chrome-browser features finding their way to Android browsers or even the default browser.

I'd be really happy if they get Android browser to support SVG.

I have a port of Chromium (version 5) on my phone. I don't use it, except for the odd bit of testing, as dragging over the page selects text rather than scrolling. That said, Chrome's V8 runs JavaScript much faster than my phone's native Gecko browser.

As for Chromium vs the Android browser, it looks like Chromium has way more features than even Honeycomb's browser [1]. Though many, such as contenteditable, WAI-ARIA, File APIs and Notifications will be difficult to implement on a 3.5" device.

[1] http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=chrome+14&b2=androi...

A potentially huge deal would be that with Chrome on Android you get extensions and NaCl.

Google TV already runs the Chrome browser on Android.

So will Android be getting SVG support finally?

Android already supports SVG as of Honeycomb.

It may have been enabled for some Honeycomb tablets but its not supported on Android mobile phones yet.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1376

They've been holding it back for nearly 3 years now because it adds 1mb to the android build.

iPhone has had it for years and even Blackberry natively supports it.

Am I the only one that likes Firefox Mobile?