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Google Chrome comes to iOS

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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Google’s Chrome browser is now available for iOS devices. There are plenty of alternatives to Safari now, so is Chrome good enough to stand out?

The simple answer is yes – first impressions of Chrome on iOS are excellent. It’s fast, has some great features and offers some advantages over Safari too. Here’s our hands- on review of this latest addition to the iOS browser family.

Features

Chrome is a tabbed browser, and unlike Safari, they are unlimited. The address bar doubles as a search box, which gives you a cleaner interface. New tabs have a home screen with you six most visited pages, and you can swipe it to find your bookmarks.

Chrome also has an incognito mode which is much easier to use than Safari, as you don’t need to access it from Settings.
If you use Chrome on other devices, you can sign in and sync with them. This means you can easily use your bookmarks from home, and open the pages that are open on other instances of Chrome.

Look and feel

Chrome feels different to Safari, but it’s still got a clean design that fits beautifully with iOS. The tabs work very well and are fast. Making use of the white space in new tabs is a great feature, and browsing is fast and smooth.
If you use Chrome at home, the sync is a neat feature that’s really useful. Unlimited tabs is a liberating experience after being a Safari user too.

Overall, Chrome on iOS feels like a grown-up browser; much less of a mobile compromise than Safari.

The only issue I have with the Chrome app is that you cannot set it as your default browser on iOS. It’s not Chrome’s fault, but Safari will still open if you click a link in an email. That’s something that cripples all Safari alternatives on iOS, but Chrome is good enough that it could still be your first choice for browsing the web on iOS.

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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