Chrome Likely for Android

Google's Chrome browser is likely to be ported over to the company's Android mobile phone platform, longtime company veteran Sergey Brin has said in an interview. Explaining the reason Android doesn't already come with the browser, Brin says Google was unwilling to "bind" the fate of the two software projects but that the near-final code now makes it safer to consider loading Android with at least some aspects of Chrome, which has a much faster JavaScript engine friendly to web apps.

"Probably a subsequent version of Android is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack," he says.

The switch would give a significant though not dramatic edge over the iPhone as well as many Nokia Nseries phones, both of which use variants of the open-source WebKit engine but presently rely on older JavaScript engines that hurt performance for more complex websites. Android itself already runs WebKit but has its own independently-designed browser to match.

No timetable has been given for when Chrome influences might first appear in Android, which will debut first with the T-Mobile G1 in November.

By Electronista Staff