Nitrous jailbreak tweak review
Nitrous is an application for Jailbroken iOS devices that allows web browsing applications such as Chrome or Dolphin to access Apple’s native Nitro Javascript engine.
Generally third party web browsers have been forced to use Safari’s webkit to access the underlying engine, but with Nitrous you can basically cut out the middle man and get a great performance increase. Using the Peacekeeper Browser Benchmark test on Chrome running on an iPad 2, I went from a score of 308 to 549 overall. Some elements were significantly faster than the 70% overall improvement in speed, and some saw no improvement.
Overall, although it benchmarks 70% faster, the improvement feels like about 50% and to me runs almost as well as Safari, but with all the features of Chrome I love.
The Nitrous jailbreak tweak is not free, coming in at a whopping $0.99. (It’s also not something that should break the bank should you choose to purchase it.) I’ll put one note that in Cydia I purchased and then had to completely exit Cydia before the purchase registered, but that’s Cydia’s issue and not Nitrous’s.
Beyond a huge improvement in what your browser can do, there’s not much to the tweak. It just works. And if it’s not working for any reason or you just want to see a before and after, you can simply turn it off from the settings panel.
It has made using the web on an iPad something I can handle. A web without Chrome is not something that I can handle very well, as trying to remember which one of the hundred sites a day I visited on another device is a pain. Also watching a page render slowly is a pain and I honestly thought that it was the physical device’s fault, and not Apple’s horribly restricted operating environment. As an Android guy in the Appleverse, this is something that’s absolutely required to make me not want to put the device down and go back to any of my umpteen other devices to do web browsing on.
Nitrous is available in Cydia, which you’ll have if you’ve jailbroken with evasi0n’s toolkit (which you should).
