Gadgetory

okay so we're looking at Chrome Beta for Android which is the first version of a proper Chrome browser for the mobile platform and this is obviously running on Ice Cream Sandwich on the Galaxy Nexus and it's not yet the default browser for the platform but it seems like Google wants to make this the default browser once they get some of the kinks worked out so the browser looks pretty similar to the other the current Android browser you can see here it's displaying some sites in their mobile versions here's New York Times in its desktop version and it's pretty fast it actually scored higher or lower rather in SunSpider than the previous Android browser and the iPhone 4s browser some stuff works really well some stuff doesn't work that well our page which is a little bit heavier and also utilizes Typekit does not display 100% correctly they still don't have Typekit working properly for the Android browser so you get almost everything looking right but then you end up with some of our fonts not rendering properly but in terms of pinch to zoom and tap to zoom it seems to be working pretty well though there are some some weird hiccups like you're seeing right here obviously it does tab browsing as you can see here you can get through tabs by swiping on the edges these are the tabs I have open there's also a way to see all of your tabs by hitting the tab button and you get this handy a little tab viewer which is actually quite useful you can swipe tabs you don't want out of the way and in fact you can you can use multi-touch here so you can take a look at one while you're hiding others and it's a neat visual effect but it actually has some some basis in reality and and usability another new feature they added that's pretty cool is the ability to more accurately tap on clusters of text so if you have an area where there's a bunch of small text near each other it'll actually zoom in on it to let you get a more accurate selection that works pretty well most of the time sometimes it's a be a little flaky in fact the browser itself is a little bit flaky it's in beta right now so I think it's leading to some weird hiccups and stutter enos that hopefully won't be in the final version of it once this makes it to devices it still feels like a really fast light browser one of the coolest features they've added here is a new ability to sync with other devices so when you're opening tabs you can go to this mode this right here this folder with the arrows and it actually will sync with other Chrome browsers on other devices you have so in this case my computer is synced and these are the tabs I have open on my computer right now and it keeps those up-to-date it updates every so often and you can basically play shift your session it has specific URLs that load up this will work with an Android tablet or with computers where you've signed in with your Google account and you're using Chrome it's a pretty nice feature it also gives you access if you're if you are logged in it gives you access to your bookmarks that you've got here's my some blogs that I've bookmarked that are on my desktop and you obviously have access to them here in the browser so another cool new feature that Google is added is the ability to prefetch some web content when you're on Wi-Fi and using a synced account using the auto predict here apparently when you start typing here and it's looking at the possible sites you might pull down it's grabbing some data as well and so it should improve load times this site we had loaded up earlier so that might be part of the cache there but overall I have noticed that sites seem to be loading a little bit faster all in all it's a really nice effort from Google it shows a lot of visual polish some of the browsing can be less than perfect and hopefully that's just stuff they need to work out in the beta but for now I've switched my default browser to Chrome Beta and I don't think I'll be going back