Chrome For Android Is Now Almost Entirely Open Source

jones_supa writes: After lots of work by Chrome for Android team and a huge change, Chrome for Android is now almost entirely open source, a Google engineer announced in Reddit. Over 100,000 lines of code, including Chrome's entire user interface layer, has been made public, allowing anyone with the inclination to do so to look at, modify, and build the browser from source. Licensing restrictions prevent certain media codecs, plugins and Google service features form being included, hence the "almost." This is on par with the open source Chromium browser that is available on the desktop.

Comments

Extensions

[Ultra64]

Does this mean someone will enable extension support?

Re:Almost?

[blueshift_1]

Agreed. There is naturally still a place for proprietary software in today's business. However, it's good to see companies making their black boxes a bit smaller.

Re:Almost?

[Kjella]

It means it's closed source!

Missing codecs: AAC, H.264, MP3
Missing plug-in: flash

So either patents or not their code, if you got a good solution for that I'm sure Google would like to hear it.

Re:Why should I be excited?

[phoenix_rizzen]

Because Chromium isn't in the Google Play Store, so you can't "just get" it?

There's an unofficial, test, "use at your own risk", "untested" APK that one can download from the Chromium website and side-load onto their Android device. But that's a lot more difficult than just installing it via Play Store.

Fork with extensions support

[allquixotic]

I think the mainline Chrome for Android will never support extensions because they want to avoid opening up the "Pandora's Box" that will eventually lead to one of the popular adblockers showing up for Chrome on Android. And since they have such a huge installed base of phones running Chrome, there is a huge financial incentive for them to disallow adblocking extensions for Chrome.

Now that it's open source, I would be greatly appreciative if someone could work on a version of Chrom(ium/e) for Android that has either extensions support, or built-in support for AdBlock-style blocking (i.e., don't even make the HTTP request if the URL or DOM element matches a pattern).

I want the (admittedly superior) performance of the optimized Blink layout engine and V8 JS engine, which no other browsers (that also offer extensions or ad-blocking built-in) offer; I also want the Google-specific blobs (Chromecast in particular); and I want/need AdBlock. Lacking this, I just end up using Firefox for Android, which has decent performance but not great, and has several site compatibility issues that Chrome doesn't for some reason.

It'd be awesome to see an adblocking fork of Chrome have a larger number of users than "mainline" Chrome.

Re:Fork with extensions support

[LoneBoco]

Are you using AdBlock Plus for Firefox or uBlock? ABP might be a little too intensive for a mobile CPU and you might be better served with uBlock on your phone. I personally use uBlock on Firefox for Android and I don't have any performance issues, but that's just me.