Google Chrome on Android

For a complete list of developer features in Chrome on Android, refer to chromestatus.com. Download Chrome on the Play Store.

A first-class browsing experience

When the user signs into Chrome on one device, the tabs and browsing history of that session are available to the user when they sign into Chrome on another device. The entire page content is synchronized between Chrome instances, not just the URL, so the user doesn't have to resubmit credentials to see a boarding pass or an article on a site that requires a login.

The address bar uses prefetching to fill in URLs and performs search queries with suggestions based on browsing history and local bookmarks. This feature only runs when the user is connected to WiFi.

Performance

Chrome for Android brings to small devices the same multi-process architecture, GPU-accelerated rendering, and the V8 JavaScript engine, optimized for mobile architectures. Chrome for Android delivers fast graphics performance thanks to:

• GPU acceleration for the canvas element
• Fluid CSS transforms and transitions
• Support for requestAnimationFrame for more efficient animations

Use DevTools to find and fix problems

You can debug mobile web sites with the full suite of Chrome DevTools running on a desktop browser, connected to your phone with USB. Learn more about remote debugging.

In addition to DevTools, Chrome for Android provides more advanced developer features for very specific use cases:

• GPU diagnostics: chrome://gpu
• AppCache debugging: chrome://appcache-internals
• Net stack debugging: chrome://net-internals

You can also use the Resource Timing and User Timing APIs to analyze application performance.

Work offline

Working online is convenient but connections sometimes fail when the signal is blocked or nonexistent. To make this easier, Chrome for Android supports the following storage APIs:

• AppCache or application cache.
• FileSystem and File APIs (File, FileList, FileReader, Blob)
• localStorage for storing simple key-value pairs
• IndexedDB, a standard indexed datastore

Learn more about offline storage.

Standards and APIs

Chrome for Android supports modern web standards. For an updated view of features per Chrome release, refer to chromestatus.com.

Device APIs

In a mobile world, it's important to be able to access your user's contextual surroundings, from location and device orientation to camera access. Chrome for Android provides:

• Geolocation API for accessing location
• HTML media capture for camera access
• Device orientation for portrait vs. landscape orientation
• Android Intent URIs such as tel: and geo: that give access to the dialer and Google maps

Standard APIs

Chrome for Android supports many HTML5 APIs that are ready to use in your apps.

• requestAnimationFrame to achieve optimum animation performance
• Interactive communication between server and client with WebSockets.
• Multi-threading with Web Workers (dedicated only)
• requestFullscreen method (presently via the prefixed call, webkitRequestFullScreen()) to allow you to hide the browser UI (chrome)
• WebRTC for real-time communication without a plug-in
• WebAudio to process and synthesize audio signals
• Experimental support (via chrome://flags in the Chrome address bar) for the following APIs:
  • WebGL for creating three-dimensional graphics for web browsers

Security

Chrome for Android supports Content Security Policy to significantly reduce the risk and impact of XSS attacks, using the standard (non-prefixed) HTTP header, Content-Security-Policy.

Known issues

For current issues, see the list at crbug.com and star the ones you need the most. If you find a new issue, log it using new.crbug.com.