Chrome for iPhone Will Offer Tab Syncing Across Devices
The increasingly popular Chrome browser has been released on the iPhone and iPad and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store. The Google browser has been limited to Android devices and desktop computers until now, but at an I/O conference Thursday, Google announced the browser would be made available on the iOS.
The mobile browser will offer synchronization across devices, so that users can keep using their already saved bookmarks, settings, and even open tabs as they switch between desktop and iOS products. This is a fantastic feature that will help users who switch between devices throughout their day but want to keep their searches available to them.
The browser will also of course offer its popular incognito mode for browsing without leaving a digital trail in your history or cookie buckets. When a user opens a new Incognito tab, Chrome creates a stack of tabs that do not track your browsing history. This does not impede a user from continuing to browse normally side by side in other tabs.
The look and feel of Chrome on the iPhone will be similar to that most users are used to on their desktop computers. However, the tabs will not be situated across the top of the screen, but rather accessed through a tap on the top-right of the screen. The tap will bring up the user's open tabs in vertically stacked cards that can be flicked through.
On the iPad, in Chrome's omnibar users can also get a microphone icon for the voice search feature, so the user can just speak their search.
However, it appears that Chrome may be forced to run slower than Apple's own built in iPhone browser, as it was not able to use Mobile Safari's Nitro Javascript engine. But the speed difference isn't hugely significant in trial tests and so the special features Chrome Mobile offers could see many switch to it as the default browser, especially given users can sync their tabs across devices. Apple's iOS 6 will offer a tabs cloud sync solution, but until that is available Chrome could be the most user-friendly browser for your iPhone.
