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Comment by rryan | Hacker News Reader

Well, there's more to Chrome than its pure rendering and JS speed you know?

Predictive prefetching makes sure Chrome already has the page data before you finish typing. It can still beat Safari with tricks like this.

Chrome Sync syncs your profile (credentials, tabs, bookmarks, omnibox typing model, etc.) across all your devices.

The user interface for managing tabs is also very slick.

Auto-update is gimped by the app store approval process, but at least you know that the Chrome team takes security very seriously and will take the minimum possible time to patch security flaws.

Those are some things that I would want over Mobile Safari.

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I totally agree. Everything in iOS Chrome works amazingly well and all of its features feel very natural to me. I primarily use Chrome across my other machines so it's nice to have all of the same information on my phone now.

"Predictive prefetching makes sure Chrome already has the page data before you finish typing."

As a website owner, I really hate that 'feature', it really screws up the exit rate in my site stats (I don't run ads on my sites.)

I always assumed prefetching just grabbed html output... does it run javascript too?

Prefetching just grabs HTML.

Chrome also does prerendering in some cases, which runs JS, fetches stylesheets, etc. The user may or may not ever see the result, of course.

You could use the page visibility API to wait until the page is visible before loading the analytics code.

https://developers.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/pagevisibil...

This is only for prerendering. I think joshuahedlund is right about prefetching.

> Auto-update is gimped by the app store approval process, but at least you know that the Chrome team takes security very seriously and will take the minimum possible time to patch security flaws.

But most security flaws are in the renderer, which comes from the OS. The Chrome team has no ability to do security updates for that copy of WebKit.

Frankly, I'm surprised they were willing to brand this wrapper as "Chrome", given that (and the more general issue that it's not the Chrome WebKit and is slower / less featureful / etc.).

Does the iOS version have predictive prefetching?

Yes.

>Chrome Sync syncs your profile (credentials, tabs, bookmarks, omnibox typing model, etc.) across all your devices.

This really is a killer feature, but it needs some tweaking. I do not want iChrome to autofill the same urls it does on my laptop. Let the mobile version default to mobile sites, and the desktop version default to full sites.

But arent sites smart enough to redirect to the mobile version even if the requested url is the same?

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