If you use Google+ or Twitter and follow anything to do with Android the you will no doubt have seen that Google have released Google Chrome Beta to the Play Store today.
Now, if like me, you are a little confused and thought something along the lines of “but wasn’t chrome already available?” then here is what I was told…
Glenn Blair 22:34
This is a beta, they will trial new features in the beta app then move to the full app.
So there you have it, Google are using the public to test out Beta apps on Android now!
So let’s take a look at the app then, what’s so good about it and does it really need to be installed?
Well let’s start off by saying at 21.50MB on the Galaxy Nexus, this is no small file! Why is it so big? I have no idea but the Play Store advises that the size should be 22MB so I can live with it being smaller than advertised.
I didn’t manage to get a screenshot of them all however when first launching the app you are asked to allow the app access to a number of things on your handset / tablet such as your Google Account and some things I have never heard of.
At first glance there appears to be nothing different about the full version of Chrome and the Beta version and infact the only differences I could find with both versions was the about screen.
As you can see from the screenshots, there are differences in the Application, Webkit and JavaScript versions however for the ordinary user (who most likely wouldn’t download this) there is little difference to be seen.
Now, a lot of people will tell me that benchmarks aint worth the screen text they show however given that I’m no browser expert and that the only way I can compare one browser to another is via a benchmark I decided to run both the original Chrome and Chrome Beta through their paces on Browsermark 2.0.
Before I show off which of the browsers performed best, here is how Chrome performs on Browsermark 2.0 using Windows 7.
And now lets see how the two mobile versions compared.
The image on the left is Chrome and on the right is Chrome Beta
So if benchmarks are anything to go by then both apps have a long way to go before they match their PC counterpart however as you can see, the Chrome Beta app seems to perform around 40% better than other phone browsers whereas the original Chrome is at 30%. This tied in with the conformance results do suggest that the Chrome Beta app is marginally better than the original so for that reason, I’ll stick with the new Beta app.
[appaware-app pname=’com.android.chrome’]
[appaware-app pname=’com.chrome.beta’]
