Just in case you were thinking it, Google wants to stop you right there. The answer is “no, they will not be enabling Chrome extensions for the browser’s mobile app”. This was the gist of the answer from a veritable Chrome insider as he went on one of reddit’s famous “AMA” (ask me anything) sessions. The mobile browser will remain extension-less for the foreseeable future.
Jason Kersey, Technical Program Manager of Chrome for Android, has said it thusly – “There are no plans to add extensions support on mobile. We haven’t been able to implement these on mobile and still have it be a good user experience.” If we analyze that statement, there really is no solid reason given. We have to read between the lines and interpret what “user experience” means.
Extensions are resource hogs, and we can’t really have that on an Android device where you almost immediately feel it if an app or an element hogs all resources. Chrome extensions, judging by the way they act on the desktop version, are pretty resource intensive. They in the background when the browser is open. With smartphones and tablets designed to run on less RAM than a laptop or desktop PC, it’s pretty obvious what the hit to “user experience” would be, and Google is just not bothering with that for now.
That said, Kersey intimated that they are looking into improving Chrome’s memory usage, with users complaining of speed issues and lags. “We are profiling Chrome to improve our startup speed and proactively fighting memory bloat and memory leaks,” Kersey said. “For example, this year the first gesture latency and mean input latency has decreased steadily.” Well, we hope that it’s all downhill from there.
VIA: OMG Chrome
Does anyone actually use Chrome on android, though? I would have thought the average Preston would use the stock browser, while power users flocked to something much better, like Dolphin?