“No, there’s only one area where Android falls really, horribly, undeniably short when it comes to the tablet form factor: The web browser. It’s the most fundamental tablet app, IMHO, and yet the web experience on Android could not possibly be worse.” This, right here, is it. On my Nexus 7 – there’s not a single decent web browser. Not one. The stock browser? Crashes a lot. Chrome? Slow, touch-unfriendly UI, laggy, and locks up all the time. Everything else uses non-standard UIs are, are plain buggy, are also slow, or any combination of the three – and yes, this includes your favourite browser. I’ve been through them all. Just yesterday I loaded up my iPhone 3GS, and Safari was like a dream. Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Phone 8? Buttery smooth and excellent UI. How Google – a web company – can let this situation persist is beyond me.
At least in theory, it should be possible to do straightforward port of webkit2 rendering engine to Android, giving similar performance to iOS. I don’t understand why this is not happening.
iOS does not use WebKit2, they have an old fork of webkit tree and uses a heavily modified WebKit1 layer.
On top of that. It is not quite straightforward to do a new WebKit port. To get something stable and good, it is at least a year worth of work for a team of 10 very good developers.
If you do want WebKit2 on an android device though, you can checkout the Snowshoe browser, which uses the QtWebKit’s WebKit2 API QQuickWebView. It is still a under development, but looks very nice.
Edited 2013-02-10 21:31 UTC
Turns out you are right; I got misled by the initial quick googling:
http://9to5mac.com/2011/03/06/a5-processor-and-webkit-2-engine-comb…
Opera Mini and Mobile ain’t good either, they don’t use the desktop ‘Presto’ engine, which is more and more crash prone while being somewhat pretty decent IMHO. However since Opera decided to ditch out their internal web and javascript engine for webkit, I don’t know what gonna make a difference in the long run.
Kochise
I have absolutely no complaints about Opera on either my tablet or my phone — it’s fast, stable and certainly more suitable than many (any?) other browser. I have not had a single crash with it, either, yet I’ve been using it on a daily basis for, well, whenever the hell I got my tablet. Must be around 2 years by now.
As for the article: Opera Mobile looks out-of-place, that is true, as it does not follow the UI-conventions set out by Google. But well, does it have to follow them, anyways, if the way it behaves and looks now works better? This in mind I just cannot agree with Thom’s assessment that any and every browser other than Safari or IE is a horror to use.
I couldn’t agree more. Opera mobile for me is quick, stable, and interoperates with other programmes sensibly. In addition to the fact that its performance is risible on my Prestigio 5197 tablet (admittedly a bit of a dog but Opera outstrips FF and Chrome on it, so it’s not all down to the kit itself) the UI on Chrome on my Galaxy S2 just feels like someone has been smoking crack cocaine before getting down to any design work. Horrible.When I use a browser, I want to be able to get at the content I am after out there, not participate in someone’s joke of spatial-awareness test .
So what, if Opera Mobile is enough, why moaning ? My experience of Opera Mini / Mobile is that they are subpar with their desktop counterpart, especially in rendering fidelity, which is basically a shame, considering the experience of Opera Software Asa in their field (since 1996 is I recount correctly). Opera Desktop ain’t that heavy, around 12 MB, and trimmed from email, bitorrent, news, IRC, … functionality, it might be possible to run such a version on middle or high-end Android devices. So what ?
Kochise
The stock AOSP Browser and Firefox are both fine on my Nook Color running Cyanogenmod 10. You’re doing something horribly wrong if the browser’s locking up on better hardware.
Maybe you just have a different definition of “fine”. You should compare against the iOS version to calibrate your expectations.
I am running CM10 on Tegra 2; it’s okay, but I still note pauses when entering address, occasionally when panning, etc.
My dad has an iPad 2, and Safari on the iPad is a piece of crap. Really. It scrolls nicely, and has enough marketshare that people have to cater to its quirks just like IE6 a decade ago. Other than that, it is worse than AOSP’s Browser in every conceivable way. The UI is too clunky and at the same time doesn’t make the tab buttons as accessible as Browser. It’s not properly extensible. There’s nothing like Adblock. The lack of filesystem access the whole OS retarded, and this is especially true when it comes to the Internet. What’s the procedure for downloading a file through Safari on iOS, then downloading an app to handle that file, and then going back to Safari later to find it? On Android and “real” operating systems I just navigate to my downloads directory and tell the file manager or shell to open the file with the new application.
Your opinion.
Um… a button is a button. The tabs in Safari on iOS work pretty much like the ones in Chrome, so I’m not clear what your complaint it.
It’s a mobile browser. Why should it be extensible?
Maybe this is more to do with the sites you visit? I rarely have an issue with this.
In your opinion.
Well, it depends what you’re trying to achieve. Safari will offer to “open in” an app on your device. If there isn’t an appropriate one, personally I save it to Dropbox or Google Drive (which normally always pop up.) I then either go to the appstore to find an appropriate app, or realise I’m using a tablet, not a desktop PC, and access the file on my desktop machine later. However, 99% of the time, I’m downloading a file that I know I can already handle, so I just open it in the appropriate app (e.g. PDF – iBooks, Word – Pages, Excel – Numbers, image – Save to camera roll, Zip – Winzip.)
It’s also worth noting that other browsers do exist. iCab is excellent for this type of thing, as it has a built in download manager, so you can cut out the “Dropbox/Google Drive” step.
Which is exactly what you do on iOS is you have any kind of common sense. Just understand that you use the right tool to enable that to happen. I’ve said this before many times – I regularly read Manga on my iPad, and I do this by downloading a file from a site (usually a zip or rar), renaming the file to have the CBZ/CBR file extension, then I open it in Comicbook Lover. None of this is complex. I use iCab, but that is the only concession I make. It’s actually more work to do the same on Android, because I have to manually find the file, rename it and them move it out of the downloads directory.
Most of your complaints can be addressed by not using Safari. I also agree that Safari’s UI is clunky, especially for something with a tablet-sized screen. My solution: use Atomic web browser. It has file downloading (with dropbox integration if you so desire), desktop-style tabbed browsing, a full adblocker, user-agent spoofing, and all the UI customizations you could want. If you’d rather, you can always use Chrome for iOS. If you want to download anything in a browser that doesn’t have a download manager, you simply need an app designed to store files. There are free ones, but my favorite is Air Sharing which is not free. As long as it registers with the open in function for any file type, you simply let Safari download the file. The myth that Safari can’t download is just that, a myth. It will download a file just fine, but it won’t save files it can’t view so you simply hand that file off to another application.
I don’t see what the filesystem and the internet have to do with one another. If you want remote file managers, there are literally dozens to choose from, both free and otherwise. They all support downloading and various easy ways of moving files on and off the device once downloaded.
That’s what the open in function is for (see above). I get the feeling you really haven’t delved into advanced iOS usage. If you had, you would have known about this and other functions. I, personally, would absolutely love to have full filesystem access but it does not, contrary to popular belief, make most tasks more difficult. You do, however, have to get used to it and there are some cases where it is nowhere near as streamlined as it needs to be.
My iPad owning friends always look jealous when they try Chrome on my Nexus 7. IT IS GREAT. Not a single crash during usage, feel very smooth (yet different ‘physics’ than Safari/iOS), the tabs work great and the best feature is the little zoom when you click on a link that’s close to some other link to make sure you don’t click on wrong one.
Man, you have something wrong with your Nexus if Chrome is pain to use. It’s best tool for me.
Same experience here. Granted, I don’t use my Nexus 7 all that much, and will probably get rid of it soon (thinking a large phone or phablet will suit me better), but I’ve never had a browser crash that I can remember, neither in Chrome nor in Firefox.
I had lots crashes with both with CM 10 and 10.1. But recently it got better. Still there are some things where both are killing you. Eg in chrome when I try paste text into this textbox the scroll position jumps right after the paste popup-menu appears and then the paste popup-menu just disappears again making pasting text into a textbox near impossible.
Same here, I’m quite puzzled as to what’s supposedly so awful about the Android build of Chrome, it works beautifully for me.
Being a web developer and having to work with all of them all day. Every single browser is rubbish in their own way.
Though I think modern web browsers are better than before I think my “WTFs per minute”
http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b012877707a4597…
is still the best measurement.
I have an Ipad and I can’t stand Safari while Chrome in my Nexus 4 is absolutely brilliant.
Yeah, Android browsing has always worked okay for me. Then again, I have an ad blocker installed, so that probably goes a long way
hehe
…only 7 votes for this post… ?!?!?!
c’mon, you can do better!!!
I have Asus TF101 and its not laggy at all. It used to be laggy on very first firmware builds, but now its very smooth and enjoyable. Don’t judge every android tablet based on one with crappy firmware/hardware.
Edited 2013-02-10 21:27 UTC
Well, I am sure there could be something to this argument, but he is testing on the very first Android tablet ever made (the Motorola Xoom). Very hard to be sure that that isn’t what is throwing things off.
Xoom was the first honeycomb tablet. There were several Android tablets available before that.
Let me rephrase that; the first Android tablet when Google was at all trying at making Android a tablet OS. The random hacks running a phone OS I wouldn’t count at all.
He runs CM on it or?
I use Firefox Beta + Adblock Plus + Phony (set to Desktop Firefox) + Flash (side-loaded) – gives me a *great* browsing experience on both my Nexus 7 and 10 tablets. Not sure why Thom doesn’t seem to like or use Firefox – Android is actually the one platform where it’s miles ahead of the competition on all mobile platforms, IMHO of course.
Edited 2013-02-10 21:59 UTC
This, a thousand times.
Firefox on android is beautiful and responsive. My favourite feature is the reader mode, stripping the useless website cruft and focusing on articles.
Syncing, sharing, desktop mode and source viewers work perfectly.
I just decided to try the Firefox Beta on my tablet and phone and, well, it sure seems to have improved quite a bit from the last time I tried it — it’s fast and lean, and doesn’t seem to stutter or anything. It also allows me to sync my bookmarks between my laptop, desktop and the two Android-devices and grants me access to Firefox plugins, so it’s all good.
One minor nit-pick, though: I don’t need to be able to see the URL-bar at all times. I know perfectly well what website I am on, thank you very much, but I would like to have a toolbar there instead with quick access to things like e.g. reload, zoom back out et. al.
There’s an add-on available for full-screen browsing:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/mobile/addon/full-screen-252573/
Unfortunately it doesn’t give you any sort of other functionality so to access the other controls you need to quit the full-screen mode.
Well, I decided the Firefox Beta ain’t useable, it screws up font rendering all the way to hell. The following screenshot should be self-explanatory: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11811685/FF%20screenshot.png
It’s a known issue – https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=707195 .
The workaround is to set the font size to the smallest possible, which makes it consistent, and then zooming in. I’d suggest also enabling Pinch to reflow text, so it wraps to fit – but be aware that this makes it a bit confusing to navigate on pages, since zooming will leave you in a different place than you started. (I do hope they get around to centering the view on the location you zoomed into/out from eventually. It works if you don’t reflow the page on zoom.)
In Aurora (FF nightly) on a galaxy S2, it looks like this for me: http://nebdal.net/images/firefox_mobile.png
Edited 2013-02-13 18:11 UTC
Agreed, I love Firefox on the mobile. The UI gripes about tab previews are unfair, and I actually like tab previews (used them extensively in Opera before).
Well, the UI of Chrome maybe is not that good for a tablet, but I like it. It has some nice gestures and is very fast on my Galaxy Nexus. On iOS it sucks, thanks to the limitations of the Javascript engine the third-party iOS browsers’ use.
And I really hate Safari, it’s not uncommon to see a website that Safari simple render on a awful way (making it unusable), or the constant crashes that I have (don’t know if iOS 6 fixed then, upgraded not to much a go). Well, I have crashes on Chrome for Android too, but it isn’t nearly as much, and I never saw a webpage that is simple unreadble thanks to wrong rendering like I saw on Safari.
I’m not using the stock browser too much on my Android tablet, but while I was using it never once crashed. On iPad I was able to make Safari crash just by visiting a webpage with a frameset on it (on iOS 6.1 this is fixed). Worse, because all browsers on iOS are constrained to use the same engine, installing another browser didn’t fixed the issue (they were crashing, too). It’s true that browsing sucks on Android (especially on my cheap tablet), but at least you have better alternatives than on iOS.
It sounds like much of his criticism is about rendering, which safari has the largest ie advantage, being it’s the most popular. Add that to the fact that he is reading things in portrait, something most sites are not going to be made for, especially the desktop version. Other than the occasional mobile site written for an iphone, I don’t see such issues myself.
His major problem with chrome is performance, which probably has a lot to do with the Tegra 2 in his xoom. Unfortunately this processor has a lot of compatibility issues, and I see a lot of this. Chrome works great on my Nexus 7, but had such problems on my touchpad.
Get a newer tablet and stop using your 10″ tablet in portrait before saying ALL android browsers are crappy.
I can attest to that. The Tegra 2 on my Iconia Tab A500 feels exceedingly sluggish even with CM10, and even then it’s miles ahead of what it was with the stock ROM. Compared to my Galaxy Note 1 the difference is like night and day, even though they’re both similarly-clocked and both are dual-core.
It was a really bad decision on NVIDIA’s part to leave NEON out of Tegra 2, plus they made a few other short-sighted architectural decisions with it. One of those is the fact that Tegra 2 was designed to support hardware-acceleration in landscape-mode and even then only in one direction — all other modes and directions suffer a performance hit. I know it sounds unbelievable, but it’s something many a ROM designer has tried to work around.
It’s funny, because the smartphone version of Chrome has quite possibly the best ui of any mobile app I’ve used. And the phone ui would work just fine at tablet screen sizes! I don’t understand Google’s thought process here.
The inability to disable mobile sites by default is probably the most ridiculous thing about both mobile versions of Chrome.
Edited 2013-02-10 23:40 UTC
I dont seem to have any problem with Chrome on my Nexus 7. Works fine, never crashed or froze and i sure do visit a lot of websites. On my Galaxy S, due to it being 2.3, I just use Opera, which works fine too, and its really old hardware.
Agree totally.
Caveat, i have not used Dolphin or Firefox on Android.
I settled with Opera Mini, giving me the smoothest and fastest performance.
Sometimes i will use chrome because my desktop bookmarks are synced with it. Although i heard you can do this with opera as well.
I guess the problem will eventually get sorted. The stuff is ever evolving.
For reading news though i prefer google reader.
Dolphin is my preferred browser (I also have a Xoom). However, it’s far from perfect.
I have CM9 on a HP Touchpad and all the browsers I’ve tried with it work well, with Chrome being the best in my experience. Maybe there is a problem with browsers running on the Tegra chip in the Nexus 7.
Then something is probably wrong with your setup. Obviously not everyone have these problems.
Default browser and Chrome?
AFAIK Chrome is the default browser on the Nexus 7.
I’m using Chrome beta on mine, but I’ve never had any problem with the stock one: no slow downs and certainly no freezes or crashes.
Have you ever considered that maybe your tablet is faulty?
as pointed out below:
Android tablets: It’s the BROWSER
Posted Monday, October 15, 2012 2:26 am
Not that Chrome on Android has gotten any better since October
I bought my n7 in September.
I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, and couldn’t agree more with this article. Browsing on it *sucks*. Yes, you can do most things you need to, but overall it’s not a good experience.
Also, the article is almost half a year old, why present it as “News”? “The upcoming iPad mini” gave it away a bit…
As a web developer I find the stock browser to be the best, without doubt, and browsers using its engine, like Dolphin. Chrome is buggy when it comes to new HTML5 stuff like touch events and CSS3 animations. The beta is worse than ever. Also, all benchmarks shows that the stock browser is faster than Chrome. Chrome has a better UI, without doubt, but until they have fixed bugs that are NOT in the stock browser, they should not make it default. In my opinion they should use the stock browsers engine and Chrome’s UI. Maintaining two browsers as they are doing now is stupid. I hate it when I have to adjust my web apps because a NEWER browser doesn’t support what the old browser did.
Note: I am talking about rendering etc, not general browsing experience. Also, I have not tried browsing on an Android tablet except in emulator.
Yes I have filed several bug reports.
Edited 2013-02-11 10:45 UTC
Both Firefox and Chrome work fine on my Nexus 7 and Note2. Not sure why you are having issues. Did you try resetting the device? Maybe a defective device? When I got my Note2 some weeks ago it was slow browsing and disconnecting wifi. I tried everything, resetting to factory didn’t help. They replaced it and the replacement totally flies.. no lags.
Related to the browser: you can design a custom map on your computer (you know, dragging around points to get “by way of X road”) and send it to your phone. You can “send link by email”, you can “chrome-to-phone” it, you can save it as a map in your account and try to bring it up as a “layer” in the map programs (this kind of works), but no matter what…
You CAN’T get it to do driving-directions navigation for your custom map.
In some cases it’s worse: I designed a round-trip map of where I wanted to go and did “send to GPS” to a Garmin device, and all it sent was the start and end points, so it navigated me nowhere at all.
Even opening the link you can email yourself (in every Android browser I’ve tried so far, which is how this rant got started), it drops all of your custom routing points and gives you the default “quickest way” route.
I find this to be a much bigger Android problem (considering the maps/navigation are also made by Google) than any “normal” web browsing I’ve done (Kindle Fire with custom ROM, Galaxy Note 2; maybe they just have better than usual browsing experience?).
If you web search for this, people have been asking how to do it with no real progress for 3+ years.
I sold my Nexus 7 for exactly this reason. The Chrome browser sucks on it. On a web page, some fonts would be smaller, some larger. Sometimes clicking on a link would open the magnifying bar, sometimes not. Sometimes clicking on a link won’t do anything at all. I was so fed up with this behavior that I ultimately sold it.
I also have an iPad 2 which I’ve been using for quite some time and you can say what you want about its hardware, it’s miles ahead when it comes to browsing.
[q]I sold my Nexus 7 for exactly this reason. The Chrome browser sucks on it./q]
So you gave up on it before trying other browsers…
I should have mentioned it earlier.
I tried various other browsers and Firefox was the best one among them. But then my browsing history etc is not synced across devices and that was the whole reason for me buying a Google-endorsed tablet.
Another article by the dude:
Sounds like a clear case of RDF. But wait, it gets better:
Well, people have different priorities. I want AdBlock and Click-to-play Flash. This guys obviously wants everything to look exactly as on his macbook/iphone/ipad/iwatch/appletv.
Much of the stuff he points out as things making android browser “horrible” and “unusable” are things I can’t even see. And a lot are problems originates from websites and web servers not the browser. Maybe he should write a long article complaining about apple-only web developers testing only on their iDevices instead?
You do know that all Apple keyboards with an fn key have it in this awful position as well? Bottom left is the worst place for the fn key and that’s for some reason where everyone, including Apple, have put it.
The point was, this guy writes long articles about stuff ordinary people don’t notice and care about. I can already see his next article:
“The new Lenovo is a piece of junk, because width / height doesn’t equal Golden ratio”.
Do we really want to waste breath discussing his stupid ramblings?
I find it rather amusing that the guy who wrote the article wants a job at Mozilla.. yet he seems to have had no exposure or understanding of Aurora which is available for Android too.
Many of the complaints, particularly about tabs and so on have been fixed for at least one or two versions.. or at least I don’t see them anymore on my Nexus 7. Could it be only the larger screen devices have this problem?
I’ve completely stopped using any other browser on Android and Linux because I got sick of the bugs being fixed in aurora and taking so long to get back into the “official” release via play.
I own both an original Nexus 7 and Nexus 4, and Chrome works fantastic on both for me. I’ve never had a problem with either even from the beginning of owning either device, so it’s not even a matter of updates fixing something broken.
Edited 2013-02-12 00:17 UTC
I’m still on GB so I haven’t tried Chrome for Android, but the best I’ve found is https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fevdev.nakedbrowse…