Firstly, the good news. After waiting for such a long time, the Google Chrome has finally arrived on iOS. Chrome is functional on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.
The new Chrome for iOS is pretty glossy and looks beautiful. And the interface is also quite breathtaking. Anyone using the desktop client of Google Chrome can now finally sync all their bookmarks, tabs and history.
When you open the browser, it takes over the last-opened page and renders it in black & white while the page refreshes. This may not be something worthwhile to many, but it is very cool and shows that the page is out of date and the browser is reloading to offer new stuff.
You can now open and quickly switch between an unlimited number of tabs. On your iPhone and iPod touch, flip through tabs the way you would fan a deck of cards. On iPad, however, you got to swipe from edge to edge to switch tabs.
This is interesting as most iOS applications (both by Apple and third parties) use horizontal sorting. This means that you navigate by moving right or left. Google Chrome’s ‘tabs’ concept, on the other hand, moves vertically. Pages layer atop one another and you drag through them to access other open tabs. Based on the speed and touch, it either scrolls or highlights a particular tab. Importantly, it’s a natural way to sort things out.
Although Google Chrome for iOS is not a full blown version of the browser like the Android variant of the same, but still it has managed to grab a lot of attention since its launch on iOS and it has a Chrome look and feel to it.
After you’ve installed the app, it asks you for your Gmail credentials, which ties the mobile version to the desktop version. It almost immediately syncs all your history, tabs, bookmarks and saved passwords.
It also supports a host of languages like English, Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Bokmål, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Tegulu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Only time will tell as to how Chrome for iOS will fare.
