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."

Just proving the point

[paulsnx2]

Walling yourself up and limiting consumer choices and controlling the platform ...

It works for Apple for the natural 20 percent of the market where people will tolerate limited choices. Apple got ahead of the curve with the IPod, IPhone, and IPad. But they are destine to drop back to their natural 20 percent. The rest of us demand more control, more chaos, and more competition.

Interesting, but not that useful

[ProbablyJoe]

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

Re:Huehuehuehue

[ProbablyJoe]

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.

Re:Apple HAS browser competition!

[CritterNYC]

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.

Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition!

[Rob Riggs]

I think the world would be a better place if [Apple] were forced to be slightly more open.

The question is "who is going to force them?" In this case (browser choice on smartphones), I think that market forces can do that just fine. There are enough choices available right now. That said, I can certainly see where Apple could be considered guilty of tying [wikipedia.org] in this case since an argument could be made that the browser is a distinct program and that this is harming competition and innovation.

Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition!

[micheas]

In the US you can go to jail for jailbreaking an iPad (you are allowed to jailbreak an iPhone however) Wouldn't exactly call that a viable option.

Re:Hey, Apple has browser competition!

[micheas]

In the US:

• Rooting your cell phone is legal.
• Rooting a tablet is punishable by jail time.

This is as per the US copyright offices current interpretation of the DMCA.

Just a heads up for those of us in the US.