Android Options Mean "Best" Browsers Might Surprise You

An anonymous reader writes with this quote from Tom's Hardware: "Due to Apple's anti-3rd-party browser stance, and Windows RT's IE-only advantage on the 'Desktop,' Android is the only mobile platform where browser competition is thriving. The results are pretty surprising, with the long-time mobile browsers like Dolphin, Maxthon, Sleipnir, and the stock Android browser coming out ahead of desktop favorites like Firefox, Opera, and even Chrome. Dolphin, thanks to its new Jetpack HTML5 engine, soars ahead of the competition."

Comments

Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition!

[telchine]

But seriously, these walled gardens make me long for the 90's, when you could sanction a company [wikipedia.org] for even *including* their own browser with an OS,

The reasons those sanctions came about was because Microsoft had a near monopoly on the operating system market. None of the companies in the mobile space have a monopoly.

Firefox & ABP+

[Luthair]

In my usage I've generally found Firefox with ABP installed to be much faster than Browser & Chrome. Its amazing how much snappier sites are on arm processors when they don't load ads, and as an added bonus accidental clicks are eliminated.

Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition!

[bondsbw]

It depends on what you mean by monopoly. IANAL, so I don't know the legal definition. But I would argue that Apple's approach to deciding the market on its devices is anti-competitive behavior.

It's not just that browsers must wrap Safari. It's that they must use a crippled version of UIWebView, one that is much slower than Safari's Nitro engine. The result is that web pages take almost exactly double the time to load in other browsers.