Android tablets: It's the browser | Hacker News Reader

Android tablets: It's the browser

russellbeattie.com

78 pointsrevorad70 comments

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 how deeply nested it is in the HTML.)

I used Chrome for like a day untill I deactivated it (can't uninstall) and continued to use the stock browser, just because it is so mind-bogglingly ugly.

The thing that killed chrome for me was the way it uses the same UI as desktop chrome for browser tabs. On my nexus 7 (I can't speak for larger tablets, maybe it works there?), the tabs are simply too small for me to be precise about any interaction I have with them.

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...

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

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.

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 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.

Microsoft's browser doesn't get much love here but browsing is a lot of fun on Surface. First its a full desktop class browser with flash support (albeit only on some sites) the second is the full screen dedicated to browser as opposed to space eaten up chrome around the client area. It matters when your screen is small. And finally buttery smooth scrolling as good if not better than iPad.

Maybe the Metro browser in RT is different from the one in Windows 8 pro, but I find it to be infuriatingly horrible.

Interesting, What part of it?

I've noticed that I always need to aim high when I try to click on a link on the Nexus 7. If I tap where the link is, either nothing happens or I get the magnifying glass. If I tap higher than where the link is, then the link works.

Of course, I get used to aiming high on the Nexus 7, and then get screwed up when I switch to a device that is more accurate...

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.

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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.

Firefox for Android developer here. First of all, thanks for the feedback. Just a quick reply/update on some of the points raised in the post:

1. We're currently working on a new iteration of the tablet UI which will replace the sidebar on portrait with a horizontal scrolling strip that goes away when you select a tab (see meta bug 817675). The sidebar will not be "stuck" by default anymore and will slide away once you select a tab (see bug 817728).

2. We mitigate things like this with anti-phishing/malware protection and the identity status icon. However, this is not guaranteed to cover every possible case. Anyway, I filed bug 839994 to get some discussion going.

3. I agree that the current approach is not ideal if you want to browse through your desktop/mobile bookmarks very often. The current UI is more oriented towards finding your bookmarks through the awesomescreen search. Two points about this: the UX team is working on a new design for bookmarks/reading list. It will definitely involve an overhauled UI for accessing bookmarks. In the shorter-term though, we'll be working on a new iteration of the start page that gives you quick access to your bookmarks from there (no extra taps). Work on some of these changes has already started. For instance, you can now 'pin' sites on your start page.

4. This is fixed in Aurora/Nightly builds (see bug 786982). You can close the last tab. You'll see the start page when you do so.

Hope that helps. We're an open source project. Next time, I strongly suggest you to file bugs. We're happy to clarify and re-discuss design decisions whenever necessary.

And 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:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Android

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.

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.

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.

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).

I 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.

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...

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.

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.

I have a Galaxy Tab II 7.0 (so I know it's not as fast and smooth as a Nexus), but not everyone has a Nexus.

It doesn't matter what browser I use, the experience just isn't anywhere near iOS levels of ease and enjoyment. From slowness, to click position errors, to ugly fonts, to just issues typing in URLs and constant browser crashing (I work a lot with HTML5 Video). The fact that the browsing experience is so poor on the device keeps me from using it other than when I need it for testing. I'd rather browse on my iPhone's smaller screen than deal with the poor experience on a larger 7" Android tablet. When I switch to my iPad 4, I immediately feel relieved... then disappointment when I even thinking about having to pick up the Android tablet.

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.

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 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.

Fortunately there are options to android itself :)

Try out Surface.

    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.

Would you mind leaving a short explanation? Dolphin has been my favourite for a while now because it is well rounded and has brilliant Lastpass integration.

I think Dolphin is noticeably faster than Chrome and I appreciate the fact that it supports plugins. However, I recently noticed that it auto plays HTML5 videos which is quite annoying, whereas Chrome requires a manual "start" (at least on USA Today's mobile site).

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).

Interesting! After reading this I just re-tried Dolphin on my new Nexus 10 and it's much better than when I tried it previously. I'm not sure when they changed the UI (it's a lot cleaner than I remember), but it looks like they launched Jetpack just a few days before my review, so I totally missed it.

I'll have to use it a bit before forming an opinion (already noticed some shearing when pages redraw), but it's definitely much improved. I wish I had noticed before my post. Thanks!

I don't use Chrome for all the reasons mentioned already. I'm perfectly happy with the AOSP default browser though. It's much nicer than the Sense or Touchwiz browser that most Android users are used to.

Posted Monday, October 15, 2012 2:26 am

Things move quickly, I don't know how relevant this is now, especially with the latest (last week's?) version of Chrome for Android.

Really, I've consistently credited having a real browser in Chrome was the best part of modern Android. The Google account synchronization especially.

The 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.

Oddly, I prefer the Nexus 7 Chrome browser experience over iOS iPad. Yes, there is some choppiness in that Android Chrome seems not to properly format via viewport on some sites but the big griefs are absence of "full screen" and no easy goto top of page function (like you can in iOS). Other than that, I prefer Chrome on Android:

* I like its tabs model better and the OS integration (easy to bounce between apps as the browser is a utility that is often popped in and out from another app)

* Most important, it uses the OS wide font size setting and this to me is the biggest advantage over iOS -- it probably just a factor for someone with poor eyesight like me, but I need bigger text and pinching and zooming on page parts just not a joyful exercise.

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...

I 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.

Galaxy S3 and Nexus 7 experiences: Chrome on S3 is the fastest browser I've used on a mobile device. Works fine on Nexus 7 as a main browser I haven't noticed any lag (at least nothing that I could notice).

Regarding the bar in the middle of Techcrunch page are we certain is a problem with the particular browser and not the website?

So, does anyone consider the fact that most of the mobile web is optimized for whatever apple ships? It is not surprising to me that small annoyances in web pages exist in everywhere but ios. I have no comments on browser chrome though, they all have annoying behaviours in general.

I've been a pretty vocal fan of Android for years, but I was oddly in limited company when panning Chrome for Android when it came out. It seemed that every Android advocate, and even its worst critics, were falling over each other to declare it a new panacea.

It was a marked setback from the already weak native browser (I use Android phones, tablets, and iPads. There is no doubt that later versions of iOS shot it far in the lead for browsing). It seems to be a universally single-threaded browser. I'm not talking about the native limits of JavaScript...but rather every part of the browser. If a page has an HTML5 video...there's a several second pause of the entire browser while it considers existence. Layout, loading things...everything seems to stall the main thread. It is abysmal.

He's mostly right on the browser issues, but as a non-native speaker it annoys me when he gets 1 out of 7 occurrences of the possessive pronoun "its" right. It's probably the most contagious mistake bloggers make.

While I don't disagree with any of his points, I did notice the part where he mentioned not getting a job at either Firefox or Google. A little bit of anger might be seeping through.

You're not wrong.

Appreciate your honesty. :)

pasting my comment on the article itself. admittedly this only addresses one of the author's points: On any Jellybean device, if you go to Settings > System > Developer options, and check "Show touches" to do just that, it goes a huge way towards reducing confusion when you're tapping things. Having that visual feedback means you never have to wonder if you tapped something, or what you tapped on. It's hard for me to use an Android device without it now.

I'm really happy with Chrome Beta on Android. Easily beats all the alternatives. YMMV.

Happy native apps user.

>>> 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.

Chrome for iOS uses the WebKit engine that's built into iOS. The only iOS browser that doesn't that I can think of is one of the Opera ones which does it's rendering on remote server.

    Not true.

Yes it is: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups=#...

    Chrome for iOS has some pretty major technical
    restrictions imposed by the App Store, such as the
    requirement to use the built-in UIWebView for rendering,
    no V8, and a single-process model.

"Rendering and the Javascript engine are provided by iOS through UIWebView." - https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/faq

You're right, I didn't realize that.

"Per Apple's requirements for browsers released through the App Store, this version of Chrome uses the iOS WebKit, that is the mobile Safari iOS engine and components, but restricted from using their Nitro JavaScript engine."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#iOS_version

Chrome uses the built in WebKit (though brings its own network stack).

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