Google needs to gift everyone at the Chrome team a random Android tablet, and afterwards take away their main work computers for a day or two.
By the end of the month the browser situation on Android would be greatly improved.
Android tablets: It's the browser
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, I was more referring to the change in terms of when it pops up rather than the obvious bug of it being mostly broken at the moment.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#33Happy native apps user.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#34Its 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…
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.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#35I 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.
I'm pretty happy with Chrome on my Nexus 4. Only on this phone do I feel like performance is close to where it needs to be. Nexus One, S, and Galaxy have all been a little sluggish for their contemporary OS. iOS has always been tweaked for its devices to deliver responsive performance, even if it wasn't fast.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#36I sincerely wish all the tablet browsers had the following things offered/fixed asap:
1. A full-screen option so that I can experience whatever website I am on with full space and attention. Dolphin (my default browser) on iPad already has this, and it makes good for inadvertent touches on the screen taking me away from the page I am on.
2. CSS property :fixed, should be fixed you know. Even on iPad the fixed elements jump off the screen the moment you focus on text areas or input boxes. Drives me crazy! And yes I don't want to hide and fade-in that element (like with jquerymobile) just to fool the bug.
3. Tablets probably do not require pinch-to-zoom like in mobile phones. This could be contested, but seriously double tap screws the experience of clicking buttons. You expect to login, but the site just jumps to a new zoom level.
4. I played with libraries of text-editor, after text-editor, after text-editor to get the experience right. Figured out that it was the iframe (i.e. DOM within a DOM) that makes it a complete dud on iPad. Tap events bind to the iframe after a significant, unusable, time lag. On other tablets it is worse.
The list can go on. I think the problem is of approach. Tablets shouldn't be porting browser from mobile. It should have been from desktops to tablets. Or something built ground up.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#37"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. Havin…
I understand how Android works with intents, and I actually think this is a problem with how certain apps are declaring their AndroidManifest files and how the system saves decisions. If I have bookmarks to mywebsite1.com and mywebsite2.com and I select "Always" for one of the links from Bookmarks, it will still ask which browser I want to use when the Bookmarks widget broadcasts and intent for mywebsite2.com. I think the system is probably saying "Use Chrome for all links to mywebsite1.com" when what I really mean is "Use Chrome for all links launched from Bookmarks Widget". I think there should be a new AndroidManifest property where you can simply declare "I open all web links" not "I open http://*/* or whatever it is now. I understand that it's useful that I have a choice to open wikipedia links in the official app or in my browser but I see no reason to be asked for links that have no specific app for them. It's a fuzzy distinction, but important.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#38The 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.
Mobile Safari has private browsing mode, but it is quite hidden and not as convenient as incognito tabs in Chrome.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#39Bought 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.
No I didn't, maybe I should have. Chrome is so good otherwise so it felt improbable that any other browser would be better.
With that said.. I don't understand how google could ship chrome in that state. Or how the reviews (I've read) seems to fail to mention it. Maybe it's just crystalclear when directly compared to an ipad.
Re: Android tablets: It's the browser
#40Yes, 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.
Interesting.. I had no idea it was the browser that did that - I always thought it was something in HN's styling. My windows phone browser does something similar (e.g., http://imgur.com/ONCGHL8), but the decision its algorithm makes correlates with what I find useful most of the time. Does anyone here know how chrome detects the importance of the text? (I'm guessing it's based somewhat on the length of the text and how deeply nested it is in the HTML.)