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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."
There are plenty of other Safari skins available!
But seriously, these walled gardens make me long for the 90's, when you could sanction a company for even *including* their own browser with an OS, much less outright forbidding other browsers from being installed.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
...they would get smacked around for the same anti-competition behaviour which hurt Microsoft during the XP days, forcing them to change this "One browser" approach (and maybe for other apps as well). In a sense, they are lucky their rather unusual philosophy - where instead of designing products to meet the demand, you shape the demand yourself - hit the wall before they became a monopoly.
The rest of us demand more control, more chaos, and more competition.
No, the vast majority of Android users are people buying it because the phones are cheap. Not because they care about being able to root the phone, install alternative browsers, or wanting "chaos". The XDA-like crowd is a pretty niche minority.
While some of the results are interesting, I don't think this is a particularly good comparison. For a lot of the tests they said "This doesn't work on this browser, so we didn't include that test". Surely that should be a win for the browsers that DO support it, rather than just ignoring that feature. Personally, I'd care more that a browser can render more things, rather than if it can render some things a few seconds faster, but fail at others.
Not to mention, it completely ignores things like features, reliability, usability, security, etc, which are very varied between the different browsers. That's what I base my choice on anyway, and many that I've tried either crash, fail to load some pages, render pages incorrectly, or lack important features. Personally I find Firefox works best for me, but results would probably vary with different phones/OS versions, and some features are more important than others for different people
But hey, everyone loves benchmark numbers
the vast majority of Android users are people buying it because the phones are cheap. You mean low cost, not cheap. Android phones can do everything an iPhone or Windows Phone does, at a lower cost. So it is not cheap, it is a more valuable option for the customer. And the reason for that is because the underlying platform is more 'open' and less tightly controlled by a bunch of perverted sadists and corporate trolls.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
Don't be an appletard either. Firefox was not developed because EVERY WEB BROWSER ON iDEVICES MUST USE THE WEBKIT ENGINE. Even Chrome - which means what you get as "Chrome" on iDevice is basically a webkit with a different look'n'feel. Basically: a skin.
The XDA-like crowd is a pretty niche minority.
But the people who want a choice of screen sizes, durability, features, looks and yes, even cost are a real majority. The price and popularity of Samsung's Galaxy models should tell you that the "cheap Android" slur is just FUD.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Mercury, and essentially every browser on iOS, is just a different UI on top of Safari. Obviously this allows for extra features, but limits how much can be done with them. Apple enforces this rule, and doesn't allow browsers which use a different rendering engine. Android doesn't have this limitation, which allows for a much larger variety of browsers, and much bigger gaps in performance. The same site did a similar test with iOS browsers, and the performance results were very similar, which isn't exactly surprising since they all use the same back end.
..except that it's a major battery hog. Most of the third party browsers for Android are, with the notable exception of Chrome (which has gotten worse,lately) and Opera Mini (Opera Mobile still hogs battery big time). Even the "stock" browser that shipped pre-Jelly Bean sucked battery power, too. Battery drain is an important consideration in a mobile browser. Also, on this list, only Firefox mobile supports Flash at the moment. All the others either explicitly don't support external plugins or refuse to allow their use on JellyBean OS's.
Calling all iOS browsers different browsers is like calling all applications using the Internet Explorer engine different browsers. All iOS browsers are just a skin of the Apple embedded browser engine. If Apple does not enable WebGL for example on their browser, no other browser on iOS will have WebGL, simple as that, no ohter engine is allowed
Sorry, that's not Chrome. It's Safari with a Chrome skin, just like all the other "browsers" in the app store. And, like all Safari skinned browsers, it uses the purposely slower Safari rendering mode so that mobile Safari looks better. There is one exception in the app store, and that's Opera Mini. To get around this rule, Opera has a server farm in the cloud rendering pages and JavaScript and sending the results down to the Opera Mini clients. It's inefficient and doesn't work as well as a native browser, but it's the only way to "compete" with Apple. Oh yeah, and the whole Opera Mini client is designed for dumb phones that lack the power to run a real browser.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
...and the stock Android browser coming out ahead of desktop favorites...
You mean, people are picking the stock browser over mobile versions of Firefox or Google Chrome? Wow. What could possibly be the meaning of this? Let's deconstruct it and find the real truth in all this...
Oh, here it is. It's a combination of No one cares and the mobile versions suck!
Firefox and Chrome may be competitive browsers in the PC realm, but in their transition to mobile platforms, they're bringing over all that bloat and feature creep and trying to cram it all into a small screen. My Android smartphone has acceptable (but not ideal) battery life when I use the mobile browser for quick things here and there, but when I've tried to use mobile FF/Chrome apps it drops like a rock. I suppose if you sit there tethered into the wall jack you'd be fine, but at that point, why not just whip out your laptop?
But the people who want a choice of screen sizes, durability, features, looks and yes, even cost are a real majority.
No, the real majority just care about costs. I know this because I know people who work at the stores selling these phones. The people zoom in on what is the cheapest looking phone that looks the coolest. That's about it. They couldn't care about the resolutions, the CPUs cores, the amount of memory, etc.
The price and popularity of Samsung's Galaxy models should tell you that the "cheap Android" slur is just FUD.
And worldwide, those phones represent around 5% of all Android phones. If you look at the Android phones being sold in China, Africa, etc. they are not phones like the Galaxy models. They are basically phones that are just steps up from feature phones.
So it is for your own good, since you are too stupid to make your own decisions?
What if I don't care about battery life? What if I really need a webpage to load correctly and not in a way safari does it?
If they want to set the defaults that is fine, but to prevent me from doing at all unless I use their one true way is why I will never buy and iOS device.
Because clearly Apple or MS would never do that. I could not even keep a straight face while saying that.
If you are concerned you do know you can get android build from outside google right?
All third party iOS browsers are a skin over the same system level WebView compontent which is a less performant version of the stock Safari Webkit. Even Firefox on iOS is using Webkit. There's a good explanation here: http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/axis-opera-mini-alternative-browsers-iphone-ipad
Stupid flounders!
China actually has some pretty nice android phones that are on par with the iPhone 5 or the Galaxy S3.
The Xiaomi M2 has a 1.5GHz quad core, 2GB ram, 720p screen, and it runs MIUI 4.1 (Android 4.1 with a custom chinese rom). It costs $310, which is less than half the price of an iPhone 5 (and it has better specs than the iPhone). The Xiaomi M2 is basically on par with the newly released Nexus 4, but it costs $50 less.
There's also the Oppo Find 5 which will have a 1.5Ghz quad core, 2GB ram, 16 or 32GB storage, 1920x1080 resolution (1080p screen!), 2500mAh battery, and it runs Android 4.1. It might also be the thinnest smartphone to date.
They have cheaper phones too, like the Beidou Little Pepper which is only $156, and it has a 1.3Ghz quad core, 1GB ram, 5MP camera, 800x480 screen, and runs Android 4.0. There's also the older dual core variant for only $110.
No he's right. On the desktop Safari and Chrome both use heavily modified versions of webkit for rendering, and they use completely different javascript engines. On iOS Chrome is forced to use the exact same webkit as Safari and a crappy interpreted javascript engine, rather than V8 (it's own JIT engine) or even Nitro (Safari's JIT engine). Chrome is prevented from changing anything that matters for the browser so it really is just a skin of UIWebView.
I use Firefox daily on my Nexus 7 and I think that I haven't ever seen it crash.
When the Jelly Bean 4.2 was released Firefox was one of the apps that required an upgrade, but even then I didn't had a problem because I use the beta so by the time that Google sent the OTA to my tablet Firefox was already updated.
"Literally"? I'd pay money to see that happening.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe