Chrome Beta for Android impressions: Even in beta, it’s our favorite new browser

Our hands-on impressions of Google's new Chrome Beta Web browser for Android 4.0, which has almost instantly become our favorite new Android browser. Video, screenshots, and a roundup of new features explained.

Eventually Google’s Chrome Web browser had to come to Android. In my heart of hearts, I knew it would happen, but I never thought it would take so long. Senior Googlers have been quoted as far back as 2008, hinting that Chrome would come to Android. Today, it finally made the jump. This morning, Google released the first beta of Chrome for Android on all devices running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Since I happen to own just about the only Android 4.0 device on the market, the Galaxy Nexus, I downloaded the beta app from the Android Market and gave it a whirl. If you happen to have a device running ICS, you should be able to find Chrome Beta in the Market as well.

My hands-on impressions of the new browser are below.

Though most mobile browsers are trying really hard to get rid of any menus or items on the screen, the Chrome ‘omnibox’ combined Search and Address bar does not leave the screen at any time. It has a search box in it, a Refresh button, a tabs button, and that familiar elipsis button that indicates there are more options. In that menu, you can open new tabs, get to Bookmarks, and toy around with Settings. The new layout works pretty well. Oddly, the mobile browser that looks most like Chrome is Dolphin HD. The Dolphin team loved Chrome for PC so much that it completely copied almost everything about its appearance, right down to the way tabs look. 

Tabs in Chrome Beta are a bit different from the PC. Moving between open tabs is one of the best parts about the new UI. You can swipe from the side of any page to auto-move to the next open tab (this is a useful feature commonly found in WebOS and the BlackBerry PlayBook). Hitting the tabs button brings up a full menu of open pages. These are displayed in a stacked view that you can push up or down, as if grabbing pieces of paper inside a folder. If you swipe a page to the left or right, it is discarded off the screen. New tabs also have recently visited pages and links to Bookmarks and synced tabs from your PC (this feature did not work for me).

Incognito windows are here from the PC as well. These are private tabs that don’t save cookies or your search history. They’re pretty great if you’re looking up embarrassing stuff, though please keep in mind that even if Google isn’t recording your searches and browsing history your service provider is, whether that’s a phone company or cable company or whomever. Like Patrick Stewart, your ISP has seen it all; it’s seen everything. There is no true privacy unless you go to extremes.

In any case, Incognito tabs are still useful and can be opened just as easily as a regular tab. To access them, you go to the tabs page and swipe from the right. The Incognito tabs are colored dark blue and bundled together, but slightly separated from standard tabs so that you don’t flip through them unless you would like to do so.

The first thing I noticed about the new Chrome browser was it’s speed. While it could be my imagination, the browser seems to open faster and render pages much speedier than any other mobile browser, and today I’ve tested most of them: Dolphin, Firefox, Skyfire, Opera Mobile, and the default Android browser. Though it’s only in beta, Chrome already breezes past most of the competition. It starts up quicker and loads pages much faster.

Attempting to browse the Web on a phone has never been easy because it was originally designed for much larger screens. Each of the major Android mobile browsers attempt to help mobile users read text better on full Websites. Some of them load pages already zoomed in (Skyfire), while others attempt to wrap text so that it’s easier to read when you zoom in on a Web page. Chrome does modify text, but does so in a more elegant manner than most, simply upping the size of the text in every view, making it easier to read articles on a Web page from a zoomed out point of view and much easier once you zoom in with a double tap or pinch-to-zoom gesture. Zooming has a much smoother animation and flow to it as well. Did we mention that you can also search within a page to find a specific word or phrase? If you’re a journalist or blogger, you’ll love this feature — if you don’t already know about it. Try hitting CTRL+F in your PC browser. It’s awesome.  

Privacy worriers, you don’t have to log in with your Google account, but you now have the option. Doing so will let you sync your bookmarks and even active tabs between your PC and mobile phone or tablet. I couldn’t get the phone to sync up my open tabs, but I did immediately see a benefit from logging in to my account. The mobile Chrome now knows all of my autofill data, my saved passwords, and my search history, allowing it to know that when I start typing “Digital,” I’m probably going to finish that with “Trends.”

After using the Chrome Beta for just a couple hours, I don’t think I’ll be switching to any other browser anytime soon. There are some good alternatives for Android, but the Chrome team has spent a lot of time optimizing this new browser for Android 4.0 and it shows. It allows me to easily multitask, it connects up to my PC browser, and it loads pages quickly and accurately. This browser may be in beta, but it’s already more polished than most of its competitors. 

Below is a video run through of the new browser.

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Posted in: Android,browser,Chrome,favorite,impressions

Google exec comments on the sponsored Chrome campaign and the finger pointing continues

The involved parties all weigh in on the Chrome advertising debacle, including Googler Matt Cutts.

Earlier this week, Google came under fire for a pay-per-post campaign promoting its Chrome browser. In addition to being hypocritical (Google has made a lot of noise about punishing this type of spammy, page boosting, “thin” content), one sponsored blog post in particular failed to follow Google’s “nofollow” hyperlinking rule.

Google dutifully dropped Chrome’s page rank for the next 60 days and in a company statement explained that given its position, the company needs to hold itself to a higher standard.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, has also commented on the incident and given us some background on what exactly happened. “Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent results of that,” he says via Google+. “If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.”

Cutts says there was one exception, however, in which a blogger failed to make a link to Chrome “nofollow” and as a result Google has demoted Chrome’s page rank.

Of course it’s not just the fact that one of these paid-for-posts was unwittingly giving Chrome an SEO boost. Google is also taking heat for creating the very type of Web content it tries to bury. According to Cutts, the campaign’s intention was purely “to get people to watch videos—not link to Google.”

One company hired to produce the video ads, Essence Digital, cops to Google’s innocence in the entire situation. “Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kinds of promotions are transparent or are not in the best interests of users,” the company said in a statement. “In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this.” 

There’s been a lot of finger pointing in this debacle, with most of the blame falling squarely on the shoulders of the unnamed blogger who failed to use the “nofollow” attribute. But it’s all fairly simple: Google says it doesn’t engage with pay-per-post advertising, but it hired a couple of companies (including Unruly Media) which do precisely that. Unruly Media has explained that while it doesn’t tell its writers what to write, it does pay them for it. Still, for all the blame-shifting going on here, at least Google is demoting itself a bit, even if it’s just to appease us all. 

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Posted in: campaign,Chrome,comments,continues,finger,Google,pointing,sponsored