Android Options Mean "Best" Browsers Might Surprise You 251
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."
Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Just proving the point (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox & ABP+ (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition! (Score:4, Informative)
Opera Mini (not to be confused with Opera Mobile, their actual browser) is called a "remote document viewer" or something because it goes through Opera's servers, which handle rendering, compression, etc. So at any time, Opera Mini only ever connects to Opera's servers as opposed to a web browser which will connect directly to the web host. It's a technicality only from the user's viewpoint... under the hood, they work fairly differently.
Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition! (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, stock browser wins over FF/Chrome? Strange. (Score:5, Informative)
...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?
Re:Huehuehuehue (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition! (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the best citation you can get: http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm [justice.gov]
There were TONS of things they did to violate antitrust laws with regards to IE, including coercing ISPs to make their websites IE-only by including ActiveX components on the front page and using FrontPage extensions which would create non-standards-compliant HTML and only render correctly on IE.