Google Chrome for iPad

Because of Apple restrictions, Google can't do in an iPad browser what it's done on Windows—create a completely new browser with fast new rendering engines underpinning it. The only browser on the iPad in the authentic sense of the software that interprets and displays Web content, is Safari. But the Chrome-like interface and the browser's ability to sync with your other Chrome installations are the main things that separate this browser from the iPad's stock browser. Whether that's enough for you depends on your level of devotion to the search hegemon.

Interface
As you might expect, Chrome for iPad's interface is extremely sparse. You get the familiar tab bar, which looks exactly like its desktop counterpart. You can open as many tabs as you like, but once you exceed six, the last several are bunched on top of each other.  I appreciate how each displays the X to close it, even when the tab in question doesn't have the focus. You can also drag tabs side to side to rearrange them.

The area below the tab bar is dominated by a very wide address bar. Chrome differs from the iPad's built-in browser and (Free, 2 stars) but resembles Dolphin by having no separate search box. As with Chrome on the desktop, search and address entry happen in this one "Omnibox." To the left of this are the back, forward, and refresh buttons. Inside the search box on the right side are the bookmarking star, the microphone icon, and settings menu button. The microphone may seem to duplicate that  in the on-screen keyboard, but Chrome's uses Google's voice search rather than Apple's excellent speech-to-text feature.

Pressing the star in the address bar lets you add the current page to your bookmarks. Chrome for iPad's bookmark feature is more desktop-like than Safari's: You can create folders of bookmarks that appear just like desktop folders, rather than Safari's more mobile-looking dropdown box for history and bookmarks.

Among Chrome's Menu options is one choice that can be very useful for those sites that force minimalistic mobile versions on the iPad. The browser's Request Desktop Site option lets you view the full site, without the dumbing down that often occurs in sites that force their mobile version on the iPad. Mercury offers this capability, too, but you won't find it in Safari or Maxthon. But one thing you do get in Safari and Maxthon but not in Chrome is a reading view. This lets you tune out all the distracting ads and links on a publication site, showing just the main text and images.

Sync
By signing into a Google account, you can not only let Google know where you are and what you're doing at every moment, but you can also sync your Chrome browsing preferences, history, tabs, passwords, and bookmarks. This can be handy for moving between devices, such as between a PC and your iPad. To test, this, I signed in to Chrome on two desktops, and opened a few website tabs. After this, going to my iPad and choosing Other Devices from the menu, or just from the new-tab page, showed the PC names with links for all the pages they had loaded in tabs. It worked like a charm, unlike the problems I had with syncing Maxthon.

Performance
Despite what Google fanboys have written in the iTunes store reviews, Chrome is of necessity not as fast as Apple's built-in Safari browser.  Its JavaScript performance, which is key for app-like websites, is hampered by Apple's policies. One feature I mentioned at the top was Chrome's ability to preload site pages it predicts you'd visit next. The caveat here is that this only works with Google searches; even for those, I must say, I saw no page load speed improvement, even for searches that you'd expect to be easy for the feature to identify, like "PC Magazine," or "USA Today."

Since, like all iOS browsers, Chrome uses Apple's underlying Safari rendering engine, there isn't much point benchmarking, as it shouldn't differ from any other browser on the iPad. In fact, all "browsers" other than Safari must perforce be slower than Safari, since they aren't able to use a JavaScript accelerator such as Safari's Nitro, Google's V8, or Mozilla's SpiderMonkey. So if you're going to an app-like site, your best bet is still the built-in Safari browser.

Nevertheless, below are my results for Chrome, Maxthon, Safari, and Dolphin on one of the better-known browser benchmarks, Sunspider. I ran it on an iPad 3 with 16GB memory:

Sunspider 0.91	Time in ms (lower is better)
Chrome	7257
Dolphin	7284
Maxthon	7376
Safari	1838

The more than threefold advantage shows that the built-in Safari browser has an indisputable advantage when it comes to JavaScript performance, and therefore Web application performance. But for kicks, I ran one of Microsoft's tests of hardware acceleration, the Particle Acceleration test. On a desktop, a well-accelerated browser should get a result of 60 frames per second.

IETestdrive.com Particle Acceleration	FPS (higher is better)	Score (higher is better)
Chrome	9	8991
Dolphin	7	6992
Maxthon	7	6997
Safari	11	11004

So while it looks like Chrome is actually implementing some hardware acceleration, it's not as much as you get in the stock Safari browser. And all of these are not great hardware acceleration scores: Optimally you should see a score of close to 60FPS.

Compatibility
Just out of curiosity, I ran the iPad HTML5Test.com to see if there was any difference in HTML5 support among the iPad browsing apps. The test is out of 500, with points assigned for each set of HTML5 capabilities. It also reports "bonus points" for features that are not technically part of the HTML5 spec or draft, but that are good to have for full-featured Web browsers. Here are my recorded results:

HTML5Test.com	Score (out of 500)	Bonus points
Chrome	324	9
Dolphin	324	9
Maxthon	324	9
Safari	324	9

Yep, they're all the same. If you still didn't believe that there was only one browser engine for iOS, maybe this finally convinces you. And this score is nothing to sneeze at, though it falls short of Chrome on the desktop's 437 and 13 bonus points.

Privacy and Security
Since Google doesn't sell anything but ads, the way consumers pay for these fine products is by allowing the Web search giant to profile them for targeted ad serving. Probably because of this, Chrome on the desktop is the only well-known browser that still has no support for the Do Not Track mechanism, which tells sites you don't want to be profiled. On the iPad, this protection is even rarer: Competitor Maxthon is the only browser with Do Not Track enabled by default in its desktop version, but its iPad version doesn't even support the standard, and I couldn't find any iPad browsers that did.

One privacy feature that Chrome for iPad brings down from the desktop version is Incognito tabs. This simply prevents other users of the device from seeing your browsing history and cookies for the session. This implementation of private browsing is more flexible than Safari's; for the default browser, you have to go into the iPad's Settings app, while Chrome simply lets you add an Incognito tab from the menu.

Google doesn't provide any specific info on security in Chrome for iPad, but I did a rudimentary check using  Browserscope's security tests. On this measure, Chrome does the other iPad browsers one better, by only failing two of the 17 tests, whereas the rest all fail three. Chrome somehow passes the Strict Transport Security test where the others fail. I also tested a few of the know malware distributing domains from malwaredomains.com, but I couldn't find any that Chrome blocked. One that Firefox reported as a "Reported Attack Page!" was let through by Chrome. But keep in mind, such sites aren't as dangerous on the iPad as they are on a PC, since it's unlikely they could install malware programs. And none of the other iPad browsers blocked the malware distributing site.

Shiny Browsing on the iPad?
Forget everything you know about speedy browsing with Chrome: Safari is faster on the iPad. The same goes for Web standard support—you won't get any more than is included with Safari. But there are a couple of reasons you may want to use Chrome for iPad as your browser on Apple's tablet, aside from just being an ardent Google fanboy. Tabs are somewhat better implemented, and if you're a Chrome user on the desktop, you can sync bookmarks, tabs, and more. But for the most in iPad browsing extras, check out Dolphin.

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