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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 :-(
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 :-(
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.