I agree for all Android devices until the current generation. However, with the Nexus 7, Nexus 4, HTC One X, and similar devices I find the Chrome experience to be every bit as good as iOS. Maybe I haven't used iOS long enough to catch the very small differences but I now consider the browsers to be equal. The only area in which iOS still wins is startup/resume time for the browser with a few tabs.
Android tablets: It's the browser
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#22My 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 t…
In Chrome for Android beta they've implemented some changes that are suppose to improve scrolling, especially on large pages, and they've adjusted the tap disambiguation popup. If you don't want to use the beta these changes should filter down to the stable release at some point.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#23Bought 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.
Did you try using a different browser? I've heard some people say that Chrome performed poorly on their Nexus 7 for some reason, but switching browser always seems to fix it. IRL every Nexus 7 I've seen is buttery smooth, so I don't know what is causing the problem for some people.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#24"2. This is the dialog box that comes up when I click a YouTube link in Reddit. I've chose "Always" about 3,496 times thus far and it doesn't seem to ever last for more than a day or so. Basically, any time any app updates it seems to reset your default choices."
I thought the article was a bit hand-wavy in general but that's something I agree with. I'm a die hard android user and I have this problem. Why do I have to make the choice for EVERY SINGLE BOOKMARK? Can't you remember that I open bookmarks in Chrome?
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#25My 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 t…
In Chrome for Android beta they've implemented some changes that are suppose to improve scrolling, especially on large pages, and they've adjusted the tap disambiguation popup. If you don't want to use the beta these changes should filter down to the stable release at some point.
In my experience the tap disambiguation popup is worse in Beta, not better. They managed to break it so half the time when it pops up, it's empty instead of containing a zoomed version of what you tapped on so you have to tap away to dismiss it and hope it works the next time you open it.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#26The way Chrome messes with the font size is really frustrating. The fact that this is a feature makes it even worse.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#27I agree for all Android devices until the current generation. However, with the Nexus 7, Nexus 4, HTC One X, and similar devices I find the Chrome experience to be every bit as good as iOS. Maybe I haven't used iOS long enough to catch the very small differences but I now consider the browsers to be equal. The only area in which iOS still wins is startup/resume time for the browser with a few tabs.
Echoing what you're saying, on my Nexus S, Chrome is unbearably slow.
I would bet that the majority of Android smartphones -- the ones that aren't the marquee, top-of-the-line products -- all have a similar quality of experience with Chrome.
In a few years when Moore's Law catches up to the lower end of Android phones, that won't be an issue, but right now I think we're still in a transition period.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#28And 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 th…
You're totally missing the point. XUL allowed (and for Desktop Firefox, still allows) people to customize UI with addons. The new Mobile Firefox's UI is all android-specific Java you can't customize without compiling Firefox yourself and deploying it to your phone, which is basically something that 0.00000000001% of the people on this planet will ever care enough to do - and then their build will be outdated 8 hours later after new bug fixes get pushed to trunk and their custom build doesn't automatically update.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#29"2. This is the dialog box that comes up when I click a YouTube link in Reddit. I've chose "Always" about 3,496 times thus far and it doesn't seem to ever last for more than a day or so. Basically, any time any app updates it seems to reset your default choices." I thought the article was a bit hand-wavy in general but that's something I agree with. I'm a die hard android user and I have this problem. Why do I have t…
Part of the issue here is that Android lets you map different url/domains to different apps. Because maybe you want to open most URLs in Chrome but you want to open reddit urls in some Reddit-focused native app. (Ditto Play store URLs opening with the Play Market App instead of the default browser). This should only really come into play when you've installed apps with registered handlers for those URLs though.
Having said that, it seems like he's running into a bug where it isn't saving this setting and I can see how in that case it would be hugely annoying to be asked this all the time.
I'm a pretty big Android fanboy and my day job is currently Android programming and I mostly enjoy it, but I've been kind of surprised at the number of "how did they never notice this" bugs that have been introduced in Android over the recent past, especially in the two Jelly Bean releases. It is entirely possible this bug we're talking about now is phone-specific and isn't a general Android bug (I've never seen it nor heard of it being a common problem), but the amount of bugs introduced into the core OS over the past couple of releases is somewhat worrying.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#30The one thing I really like about the default android browser is the fact that it has private tabs. I'm uncomfortable with leaving some things on a portable device that facilitates being left around, picked up by strangers, et al. I can't fathom why it's not more popular on mobile browsers, including most of the third-party Android ones.