Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Snappy: mobile browser with Chrome-like extensions

I'm happy to announce a brand new product for Android - Snappy. This is a mobile browser which supports Chrome-like extensions.

The extendable browsers are standard de-facto on desktops. Yet mobile browsers provide very limited facilities for extension. Some of them declare a support of so called "plug-ins" or "add-ons", while the others withdraw such possibility completely due to supposedly large resource consumption that "plug-ins" would impose. Anyway, the range of features supported by extensions for desktop browsers is far wider than that's available for mobile browsers. This is why I decided to port a considerable part of Chrome extensions API to Android, using the mobile WebView based on the same Chromium project.

Today you may try it yourself. The browser is available in Google Play (Android 5+, WebView 48+ is highly recommended). Please visit the home page for further details. As the very first release, it may have some issues, but I hope that the whole idea is so powerful and universal to produce positive impression nevertheless.