Peter-Paul Koch is a mobile platform strategist, browser researcher, consultant, and trainer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He specialises in the mobile web, and especially mobile browser research. On the Web he’s universally known as ppk.
He won international renown with his browser compatibility research, founded Fronteers, the Dutch association of front-end professionals, and advises mobile and desktop browser vendors on their implementation of Web standards.
Meanwhile he concentrates on the mobile web, and then especially on the aspects he feels web developers are ignoring, such as the UC browser and Xiaomi and Micromax devices. His personal collection consists of about 50 mobile phones, and he uses about half of them in his daily testing. Occasionally one of them emits a soft, melancholy beep, but he has no idea which one and studiously ignores it.
The Plural of Chromium is Chromia
Where web developers expect Chrome to offer a single platform for web sites and web apps, and that all Android 4.3+ users use Chrome as their default browser, reality is diverging at a fast clip. Google Chrome has never been the default browser on any system, except for Google's own Nexus and the Motorolas that were created while Google owned the company. Most important Android vendors, such as Samsung, HTC, and LG, are now using their own Chromium-based browsers as defaults. So far PPK identified eleven of them, and they're all subtly different.
What's going on? Why does everyone want its own Chromium? Why doesn't Google step in and force Google Chrome on everybody? And what's the deal with that other Android default browser, Android WebKit?
In this presentation PPK explains exactly this.
