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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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.
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.
They're Apple's devices
Then I guess I had better give the one I've got back.