The developers of one of the most popular custom ROMs for Android devices are building a web browser, but they’re not doing it from scratch. The CyanogenMod team is working on a browser called Gello, and it’s based on the source code for Google’s Chrome web browser for Android.

gello

Google released most of the source code for its mobile browser to the Chromium project recently, and we’ve already seen developers start to build their own Chromium-based browsers.

Using Chromium as a starting point lets developers utilize Google’s rendering engine and features such as support for browser tabs, password management, auto-fill, and more. But a brief demo video shared by CyanogenMod developer Joey Rizzoli shows a few interesting customizations including:

  • night mode and immersive mode
  • edge swipe gestures
  • toggles for default site permissions (location, microphone, camera, ads, etc)
  • option to save pages for offline reading
  • advanced download manager

The Gello web browser will likely be included in future versions of the CyanogenMod operating system, but unless it features some sort of tight integration with the operating system that I’m not away of, I can’t see why it wouldn’t be able to run on devices running a different version of Android. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s either submitted to the Google Play Store at some point, or at least ported to run on other Android ROMs.

There are already a handful of CyanogemOd apps in the Google Play Store, including the Cyanogen Camera, Gallery, and Theme Showcase apps.

Update: Rizzoli has posted a longer video and some details: the browser will be open source, it won’t support devices with small system partitions, and it’s still under active development, so more features are on the way.

via Android Police

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

One reply on “CyanogenMod is building a Chromium-based web browser”

  1. Interesting…. Wonder if it will be part of cyanogen os 12.1 update

Comments are closed.