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Android tablets: It's the browser

russellbeattie.com

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Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#51

Post by wvenable »

ippa wrote: post #6

Bought 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.

I experienced laggy bad scrolling on the Nexus 7 and it turns out the problem was other applications running on the device. I rarely have the problem but if I do, I just swipe off some old apps and it speeds right back up. It's probably just one app but I haven't bothered to figure out which.

I moved off of Chrome as my default browser and now use Dolphin with Jetpack -- no only is it faster but it generally works better for pinching and zooming.

Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#52

Post by habosa »

codeka wrote: post #46
habosa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

At least for me (Galaxy Nexus), that is how it works. I've set Chrome to "always" and now any links I click on in whatever app open in Chrome. Maybe is something specific about how the bookmark app I'd launching its intents, though, because I don't use that app (I use a reddit app for launching links mostly). The exception is links to sites which have their own handlers (reddit, YouTube, etc).

It works for me with most things, just certain apps break it. If you use the bookmarks widget or have multiple Wikipedia apps on the GNex you'll see what I mean. And it's (surprisingly) worse on the N7.

Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#53

Post by wvenable »

high5ths wrote: post #9
prostoalex wrote: post #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".

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.

A good reason for jailbreaking is to allow you to set any browser as the default browser and allow any 3rd party UIWebView application the ability to use the Nitro JS engine that Safari uses.

My default browser on iOS is Chrome and it runs as fast as Safari.

Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#54

Post by codev »

magic_haze wrote: post #40
jsnell wrote: post #10

Yes, 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…

I wrote a userstyle for Firefox mobile that gets rid of the different sized text on comments and makes the whole of hn more readable:

http://userstyles.org/styles/82587/hacker-news-responsive-fo...

Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#55

Post by fencepost »

rubbingalcohol wrote: post #4
rednukleus wrote: post #2

Its 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…

I've tried other browsers and I keep coming back to Dolphin because it has some things that nothing else has that I've found. (This is on ICS)

* Gesture-based commands. I read a lot of long text pages (OK, very long text pages), and I love that I can tap in the bottom left corner and swipe a V to go straight to the bottom. The reverse gesture also works, and there are both forward and back options as well, though I don't recall which gestures I've added and which were already there. I may have added the "Close current tab" one. By the way, you can also define your own gestures. I think this may actually be my killer feature for it.

* Tabbed browsing that works well for me - I can long-hold on a link and "Open in Background" then go to that link later, though I'll admit that this sometimes seems flaky - I've had enough times where it failed to open the link that I sometimes verify with a quick downward swipe on the page to make the tabs show at the top.

* Plugins - in particular, quick access to LastPass and Save to Pocket - I have others but don't tend to use them. these are accessed by a swipe from right to left.

* Bookmarking and bookmark editing - A swipe from left to right will open the bookmarks, nested folders are available, hitting the gear icon lets you edit, etc. There's some sort of synchronization available, but I don't use it.

* Simple home screen customization - I really have 4-5 sites I hit most often, and they're right there with one click when I start the app up.

* Various useful menus for tab operations (long-hold on a tab) and page operations (long-hold on the URL field).

* Dolphin Jetpack - I can't overstate this one enough. For a long time it wasn't clear to me which browsers were actually doing their own rendering vs. being a skin on the built-in Webkit. With Jetpack, Dolphin has its own much-more-updated rendering backend with HTML5 support, etc. and for many of the pages I read the performance difference is extremely visible.

And addressing things that other people have commented on:

* Full-screen mode is available with that same right-to-left swipe.

* There is a privacy mode but it's inconvenient (Menu-More-Settings-Privacy&Personal Data-Private Mode). You can create a new gesture to switch quickly to "Browsing without history" but I'm not sure if that's entirely the same thing.

Biggest annoyance:

* Using Swype beta and entering URLs, the combination of Swype attempting to do autocompletion and Dolphin trying to do autocompletion is painful at best, and I've had occasions where Dolphin will just silently die (e.g. trying to type in "baen.com/Eleutherios.asp" which died after I'd been poking around writing this, but worked fine after I restarted Dolphin).

Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#56

Post by bvdbijl »

jsnell wrote: post #10

Yes, 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.

The worst thing is, you can't turn it off...

Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#57

Post by jsnell »

Cowen wrote: post #27
habosa wrote: post #21

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.

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.

Chrome is only available on ICS and higher, so that's not such a big deal. Phones of the nexus S vintage and power levels mostly run gingerbread anyway. (One could argue that the S should not have been upgraded at all, but realistically Google had to do it to appear credible on upgrade issues).

Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#58

Post by ux-app »

randomfool wrote: post #3

My 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…

I have to second the whole link clicking thing. I can't believe how utterly broken clicking links is in Chrome on Android. My wife's GS3 is practically unusable compared to my iPhone4.

Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#59

Post by ajross »

RivieraKid wrote: post #26

The way Chrome messes with the font size is really frustrating. The fact that this is a feature makes it even worse.

The font size weirdness is really only an issue on some sites, most notably Reddit. They are treating it as a "known issue", not a "feature". You can go vote (or whatever) for its resolution here: http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/static.py?hl=en&pag...

Re: Android tablets: It's the browser

#60

Post by yareally »

When I got an Nexus 7 finally, I just added the old stock browser for Android to it. It's not too hard to do really (assuming you are rooted/bootloader unlocked [required]). If you're unlocked and rooted, it just takes a few terminal commands to add the old stock browser back.

Tap to zoom works much better on the old browser and the quick controls for it are a feature I can't live without.

I wrote a small guide[1] on how to do it on one of the Android forums for anyone else that prefers the old browser over Chrome on Android.

http://rootzwiki.com/topic/30834-how-to-install-the-stock-br...

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