Samsung Internet blows Chrome out of the water | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Internet blows Chrome out of the water

androidauthority.com

20 pointsteleforce8 comments

I've had a Galaxy S9 for 2+ years now and I've always found Samsung's Android browser to be far superior to everything else available. People love to crap on Samsung for their software, but their browser is a real solid piece of software.

I just tried Firefox for the 5th time (over the past 2 years) last week and it was so much slower to load pages, and the scrolling experience was quite poor.

Samsung's dark mode is outstanding and while less flexible, a lot less clunkier than Firefox extensions. Any browser without a viable Dark mode setting (for sites i.e.) is a non-starter, especially when you can enjoy dark mode reading in bed with a great OLED screen.

Tab browsing and private mode both work really well.

Text zoom and general page layouts are much more readable. Accessing old.reddit.com via Firefox was a mess with the font being tiny, whereas it is totally usable on Samsung's browser.

Ad blocking works quite well as well. At the end of the day, Samsung's browser gets out of the way and executes really well on all the main things you'd want in a browser.

I really want to use Firefox or a similar browser that I trust more with my privacy, but at the moment, Samsung's browser is miles better than all the other browsers I've tried using.

I use Firefox on android because of the privacy features. Does Samsung browser support extensions of those sort?

Unfortunately not. It does support a bunch of adblockers, as well as a few limited extensions but nothing super useful on the privacy front.

I love Firefox on android, but it's good to hear there's some other competition for Google Chrome - even if it's still using the same rendering tech under the hood. Personally, I value the mobile browser extension support over the UI enhancements offered by Samsung. Hopefully Mozilla takes notes for future releases.

Oh, it's not a new browser, just a different chromium wrapper.

There is more to a browser than the rendering engine. The author in the article is saying that the main benefits of Samsung Internet come from the UI. Things like bottom toolbar, highly customizable toolbar (allowing you to create your own custom toolbar out of 25 different actions if default doesn't suit you), a true dark mode (not just a dark toolbar like chrome but also making each page dark), better ad blocker, scroll-to-top of page button, and so on.

Last I checked the Samsung browser was slower and had a lot of Flexbox issues Chrome did not. Hopefully those are all fixed now..

I will pass for now, but happy to hear about alternatives.

For time being (fast ads free internet on android)

Kiwi browser https://kiwibrowser.com/

Ublock Origin https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

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