Which Web Browser Should You Run On Your Android Device?

[getochkn]

Chrome for it's syncing abilities. I have tabs open on my tab, open chrome on my phone and continue browsing what I was looking at. Synthetic benchmarks mean nothing. Total 2 way bookmark, password, history, tab syncing rocks.

 

[vidfreek]

The TF300 is actually the same spec wise as the Nexus 7, so it can easily be used as a test bed for this type of stuff, the only one thats really better is the TF700 as it has the fastest quad core tegra 3 chip out there right now. The Nexus 10 only has a dual core processor in it, but it has more memory, 2 gigs instead of 1 on most other tablets.

I'm surprised that Boat isnt tested here, its one of the most downloaded android browsers on the market, I'm not a huge fan of it myself but it should have been in the list.

As for Android and tablets over iOS and tablets, well iOS is the same OS on everything apple makes, Android Jellybean works just fine on everything you can get it on, tablets included, what the issue is is that a lot of the developers arent updating their apps to take advantage of speed and graphics that the tablets use, this has nothing to do with Android itself, the OS runs great on my TF300 but the apps arent up to par yet with a lot of them being stretched to fit the screen as they were designed for phones and of course they arent in HD either, but thats slowly changing with stuff like Angry Birds Star Wars and many more that have an HD version just for tablets now.

iOS developers update their apps much quicker, sometimes having things ready to go on the day a new Ipad comes out (like Infinity Blade when the Ipad 3 hit the shelves) and its a much nicer ecosystem in that regard, but then you get all the hold back on decent apps, other browsers and the list goes on that IMO, make apples app store much worse in spite of the better selection. As an IT professional I can get access to so many more useful apps for my job through an android tablet because Apple simply wont let them on their system, and thats a shame really.

 

[kenyee]

But which ones support Flash?

Boat seems to do best. Firefox does, but it's pixelated. Chrome doesn't and the old native browser no longer does...

 

[Guest]

Crashing has been my experience with the Asus (original) Transformer tablet. My Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 is ridiculously good and stable though.. I'm not sure if this is because Samsung just made a more polished tablet, or if it's the difference due to the release (the Transformer is almost 2 years older), or if I just installed unstable roms onto the Transformer..

 

[mrinterweb]

How was application memory consumption not benchmarked. On the Android devices I've owned applications that consumed too much memory caused all kinds of system-wide performance problems. I have noticed with Firefox that it consumes a lot of memory, so that means that Android pages other apps in memory and forces long garbage collection cycles which bogs down the whole system. I have no idea how memory consumption was ignored in this article.

 

[willyroc]

Quite unexpected IMO.

 

[Guest]

No mention of X-Scope Pro? Half the size of most of these browsers, easy tab navigation, Flash support, its a total package.

 

[Chetou]

Dolphin?! It fails at basic task of a browser - tabbed browsing. Having to scroll up every time I want to change tabs and then scroll back to where I left off each time I switch tabs is just plain awful. As someone said, it's about features and usability, not milliseconds of meaningless synthetic performance.

 

[beavermml]

toms, not all people can buy a quad-core arm... infact many of us still running a cheap-ass android phone running single-core with 512mb ram (384 effective).. can u do benchmwark on multiple platform or atlleast multiple configurations... i mean.. almost all android devices can be categorized into 1- cheapass (1 core, 512 ram) 2-intermediate (2-core 512 ram) 3-adequate? (2-core 1GB) and 4-okayish (quad-core 1GB ram)

 

[MasterMace]

forgot to include how many of them don't support flash?

I dumped Firefox for Opera because FF didn't have Flash.

 

[ddpruitt]

One of the biggest takeaways:

The other two venues only host rigged events. We'll regularly be checking in on Web browser performance on Google's mobile operating system because, fortunately for consumers and developers, it actually matters here.

Yea

 

[anonme]

A shame you ended with implying that IOS was multi-tasking 5 apps.

You were doing well until the IOS system got suspended.

 

[anonme]

A shame you ended with implying that IOS was multi-tasking 5 apps.

You were doing well until the IOS system got suspended.

 

[anonme]

A 2nd major flaw
"Opera takes fifth, with just one-tenth of the Dolphin and Maxthon scores"

You fail to mention Opera has hardware acceleration off by default.
So you might not be comparing like with like.

Cheeky?

 

[srap]

[citation][nom]anonme[/nom]You fail to mention Opera has hardware acceleration off by default. So you might not be comparing like with like.[/citation]
You may want to understand that browsers are tested with default settings.

 

[anonme]

I might just already understand that.
I'm letting others understand the difference which ain't made plain.

That IOS thing is quite likely to breed further ignorance too, but that is slighly more standard in that territory.

 

[Guest]

What about boat browser?

 

[geost91gr]

Oh, Dolphin... I recently installed it and it's great. Even the all-mighty-and-suggested-by-everyone Opera doesn't come on par with it.

 

[anonme]

"and-suggested-by-everyone Opera doesn't come on par with it."

It does not have compression for up to 90% download data saving.
'Head in sand'.

 

[anonme]

Hype is par for the course. They are all decent.

You probably also get a free mermaid in the packet to help you swim up the ISP bottleneck.

 

[in_the_loop]

On the Nexus 7 Chrome is pretty useless.
It is really stuttery and slow and it doesn't support Adobe Flash.

All this is fixed when downloading the stock Android browser (Which isn't default on the Nexus).
It is much smoother, it supports flash (unlike chrome )and it still syncs bookmarks like Chrome.
Only way to install it is to run a custom rom on a rooted device, though.

For me there are no benefits at all running Chrome compared to "stock".
Tested Firefox and it is extremely slow for some reason (even slower than what the tests looks like here).
Haven't tested the other browsers on the "7", but not sure if any of them supports Flash. Think there were some that did, but they lacked in other areas compared to the stock one.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

I prefer OPERA , have tried them all!

 

[razor512]

FFFFFUUUUUUUU google, they got rid of the 120dpi support for chrome. (it was one of the best ones available but I like using 120dpi instead of 160 as it gives more screen space by making the android UI much smaller)

Mozilla cant seem to figure out how to reduce the height of the address bar and then add a tab bar (instead of hiding it in a menu that takes more space than the south pole)


Dolphin works somewhat okay but it has a annoying dolphin logo that stays in the lower left hand part of the screen and does not go away and has no option to remove (almost as annoying as having a dead pixel on your screen)

The makers of opera have also not discovered the tab bar

The makers of maxthon browser have forgotten that vertical screen space is not unlimited

Sleipnir just looks very inefficient with vertical screen space and seems to also not know what a tab bar is.

 

[Guest]

Anyone try Puffin Browser?

 

[in_the_loop]

[citation][nom]Po0rest[/nom]Anyone try Puffin Browser?[/citation]

Sounds like a "weedy" browser to me...