Android tablets: It's the browser
russellbeattie.com
Android tablets: It's the browser
1–10 of 73 posts
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#2Its strange, I've never heard anybody off the internet say that Android broswers aren't as good as iOS.
On the internet, when people complain they are usually told to try Dolphin, so I'm surprised it wasn't included in the article.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#3My comparison is iPad Mini Chrome to Nexus 7 Chrome, have to agree that Chrome on Nexus 7 is not up to par with iOS. But I do strongly prefer Chrome's UX over Safari's.
Primary issues with Chrome on Nexus 7:
- Scrolling performance is much slower, especially while loading larger pages.
- I have a much harder time opening links on the N7 on pages like HN front page where there are clusters of links with fairly small text. The pointer algorithm seems to be all wrong.
- Android Chrome's popup bubble when clicking links seems cool, and seems like it would solve the previous issue, but it's completely erratic for me. Often doesn't come up at all, unlike the article which says it always comes up.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#4Its strange, I've never heard anybody off the internet say that Android broswers aren't as good as iOS. On the internet, when people complain they are usually told to try Dolphin, so I'm surprised it wasn't included in the article.
Dolphin isn't great IMO. There are some real good ideas in it from a usability standpoint, and then others that are just face-slappingly aggravating.
Chrome is the best browser I've used for Android and it has problems that annoy me to no end as well. I don't think the author mentioned this, but one huge annoyance is that the tab bar is always visible no matter where you're scrolled on the page. Vertical screen real estate in landscape mode is really precious and having chrome stuck on top of the view at all times is pretty frustrating. I love how iOS Safari handles this--you see the tab and URL chrome when you're at the top of the page, and you can tap to quickly scroll to the top of the page if you need it.
I agree completely with the author. One of my primary uses of a tablet is using a web browser, and there just aren't really any excellent options on Android right now.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#5>>> Apple doesn't allow any other choice of browser except for those using it's core WebKit engine
1) Not true. http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/mobile/ios.html
2) "Its".
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#6Bought two nexus 7 over christmas, one for me and one as a present. I've only read good things about them.
Ended up returning them both due to the bad surfing experience. Laggy, bad scrolling. Sometimes it felt like it missed my swipe as a whole and just got stuck. Switched back to my ipad1 which is much better in that regard.
I liked the rest... but surfing is what I do most on a pad, so that has to be perfect.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#7I would have agreed with this article 6 months ago, before I found X-Scope Pro, which brings the features to Android that I had missed in iOS, including natural full screen mode options, copy/paste tools, and more.
See http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sui.mRelease...
That said the default Android browsers need a lot of work.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#8And worse? It's not fixable by anyone outside the core team of developers as they've moved away from the standard XUL UI system to a pure Java wrapper. I was going to get in there and whip up some add-ons because I really wanted to use the browser and thought if I could just tweak a few of it's more ugly bits it'd be somewhat usable. But after downloading the code and taking a good long look, it turns out that all the bits that suck the most are outside anything modifiable by add-ons.
Anybody can modify the browser chrome, not just the core developers. All source code is public:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/5835bc763be7/mobi...
Instructions for building:
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#9>>> Apple doesn't allow any other choice of browser except for those using it's core WebKit engine 1) Not true. http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/mobile/ios.html 2) "Its".
I think the point is that although you can install another browser, you can't set it as "default" -- links from other apps, from Mail, etc. must open in Safari unless the other browser is hardcoded into the app (like "Open in Chrome" menu items). Having an ability to set default apps would make iOS significantly more sophisticated, in my opinion.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#10Yes, Chrome on Android is a travesty, and this article doesn't even list all of the major issues it has.
The fonts being screwed up is a "feature" -- Chrome tries to detect which pieces of text are important and enlarge them (and the reverse for unimportant). I don't think it'd be useful even if the decisions on what's important worked well. And boy, the decisions really don't work well.