Nilay Patel, writing for The Verge:
But man, the web browsers on phones are terrible. They are an abomination of bad user experience, poor performance, and overall disdain for the open web that kicked off the modern tech revolution. Mobile Safari on my iPhone 6 Plus is a slow, buggy, crashy affair, starved for the phone’s paltry 1GB of memory and unable to rotate from portrait to landscape without suffering an emotional crisis. Chrome on my various Android devices feels entirely outclassed at times, a country mouse lost in the big city, waiting to be mugged by the first remnant ad with a redirect loop and something to prove.
With The Verge itself being the poster child for how slow the mobile (and non-mobile) web can be, this article did leave a bit of a funny taste in my mouth. Luckily, The Verge’s parent company – Vox Media – is going to put its money where its mouth is, and focus entirely on performance – with solid promises we can hold them to. Very nice.
I have always used Firefox on my Android – phones and I, certainly, don’t think it sucks. It is stable, it is fast (as much as you can have on a mobile device) and I get to use addons to add functionality to it. Plus it allows you to view desktop – versions of sites if you find that the mobile – versions suck. I don’t really know what more to ask of it, the real limits come from the hardware it runs on and there’s little it can do about that.
There is a reason Firefox was at one point the most downloaded browser in the Google Play Store.
I believe it isn’t anymore. Don’t know why.
Edited 2015-07-20 19:35 UTC
Wish I could still use Firefox mobile, but unfortunately it’s been nothing but crashes ever since version 33 on my devices.
Really? It sucks donkey eggs on my nexus. I use it occasionally because its better at tricking web pages into giving me a real web page and not a crippled mobile version.
Well, yes, really. I haven’t had any issues with it and I feel it is leaps and bounds better than the competition, at least after I installed an ad blocker on it; on a mobile – device ads really, really detract from the experience.
Are you sure you’re using the non-beta Firefox? There are two versions of Firefox on Play Market: the beta, and the non-beta ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox ).
Yup using non beta. Its much slower than chrome with only one or two tabs open.
I run it on a Nexus 4 with the latest Android installed. Firefox runs perfectly here with an avg of 8-10 open tabs. It never crashes and is fast.
Did you maybe install some dodgy add-on?
Is add blocker plus considered dodgy? I thought that would speed things up.
Adblock Plus is a huge RAM pig on both desktop and mobile. Use uBlock Origin for a much lighter blocker with equivalent capability.
I fully agree! I have a Nexus 4 phone, and tried Mobile Opera, Chrome and Firefox. Firefox is by far the best browser on my phone. As you said, it is fast and supports add-ons to extend functionality. Unlike another poster here, I don’t have any issues with Firefox crashing on my Nexus 4 either – it is rock solid here. I use load of open tabs too. I don’t bother with any of the other browsers now.
…that have made me grind my teeth about the mobile web experience. Despite what the article may have to say, Chrome on Android does me a solid. It’s the websites that insist on dumping you into a crappy “mobile” version of their site as soon as they detect you are not on a desktop operating system, (often diverting you from the link you wanted), and then cling to this terrible experience despite your efforts to reload the desktop version of the site. Typically coupled with a “you should download our app” popup in for good measure.
Typically the only place modern mobile browsers get stuck on full experience web sites is if you have built your site around fancy hover effects, and frankly those are typically annoying as all get out even _if_ you are on a desktop device.
XKCD gets it right as usual: https://xkcd.com/869/
Yeah! A modern phone with 1 to 2 GB of ram, a quad core 2 GHz processor, and a HD screen (sometimes greater than most HDTVs! ) can’t POSSIBLY do any good showing the web. Thank goodness PCs never had 32 MB of ram, a 200 MHz single core processor, a 640×480 256 color display and yet still be expected to surf the net!
The primary problem with most apps on phones is that for some bizarre reason, the devs think that a perfectly adequate interface for a PC app is inadequate for phones, so they gotta f–k it up royally in the quest of bad user experience, adding horrific bugs and slowing the program drastically. Seriously, I’d take a standard linux distro on my phone over Android or iOS or Windows Phone any day. It would be FAR more usable and have far more apps.
You think a modern browser would run in 32MB or less? Go ahead and try it. Install the leanest linux you can find in a 32MB 200Mhz virtual box. Now try to run Firefox…
I’ve run modern Firefox on a 128 MB / 450 MHz 603 PPC. A tiny bit sluggish, but far better than any phone browser. Never tried to run a newish version on older systems, but the browser I used back when I WAS running 16 to 64 MB and a 200 MHz P2 still ran better than phone browsers.
Back then a web page was a 10KB download.
Edited 2015-07-21 07:43 UTC
Chrome 30-something runs just fine on an AMD Athlon64 single-core CPU (1.something GHz) with only 1.5 GB of RAM (DDR1, even) on Windows XP.
Used it to watch videos over the 100 Mbps LAN using Plex Web Client, Netflix (via Silverlight), and Shomi (via Flash), and to listen to music via Google Play Music. Generally only had those 4 tabs open, but they were open all the time, and auto-refreshing as needed.
The harddrive (IDE) died in that box a couple of months ago, so it hasn’t been used since. But it was used on an almost daily basis prior to that without issues.
It’s not hard to run modern browsers on old hardware; it’s hard to find old hardware that still runs, though.
Today’s mobile browsers are FAST – much faster than desktops just a few years ago. The problem is that websites are far slower and far bulkier.
I am of the same opinion. The web is right now a mesh.
The overload of the javascript code of some websites is making the web experience frustrating.
I rather keep using my beloved apps.
It will be interesting to see if the ad blocking built into iOS 9 leads to an improvement in browsing experience. I find many web pages, cluttered with ads, pop ups, drop downs, touch traps and scripts, to be almost impossible to view on a mobile device. Web page bloat seems to be out pacing browser and hardware development. I really do think that in the last eighteen months big chunks of the web seem to have deteriorated drastically.
A quick inspection of The Verge article showed nearly 2MB of javascript being downloaded to serve that page on a desktop site, although inspecting that on mobile seemed to drop that to “just” 1.4MB. There’s only so much javascript and so many images any browser can take before a page becomes too bloated.
This isn’t about ads, this is about every single element on the page, every resource requested which is needed to display the content.
Developers and site owners have managed to get away with huge improvements in desktop browsers allowing them to add more and more features. However when you view that same page on mobile – it’s just not being to be the same experience.
If you want a blazing fast web experience on mobile (and desktop), you’ll have to consider every asset requested and evaluate if it’s adding enough value to the experience to justify it being included.
And at a guess, they only use 200kB of that, which is still about 190kB more than they’d need if they spent a day doing sensible things with HTML/CSS.
Well, went and checked theverge desktop website with javascript enabled for the first time in ages.
Conclusion: they don’t visit their own website, which given most of the content is maybe not so surprising…
Mobile browsers are great. That’s why when you encounter a well written website they are blazingly fast.
The problem is not browsers, it’s the web pages and TOTALLY IDIOTIC mobile “apps” that people try to ram down our throats instead of real webpages. “Apps” that pretend to be native but fail miserably in interaction. “Apps” that download multi-megabyte JS libraries to badly emulate what a native app can do (and break native affordances in the process). “apps” that have a fraction of the features of the full website and then can’t even transition between the two without losing all state.
There’s nothing wrong with mobile browsers. The mobile web is a curse.
i’ve got an older android 2 phone with 512mb ram, and only browser that works well on it is opera.
firefox just doesn’t handle that low memory, chrome is a joke.
unfortunately recent update no longer installs on 2.x android devices :/
Warren Buffett’s legendary frugality extends as far as his company website:
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com
Edited 2015-07-21 08:40 UTC
We recently re-implemented our mobile website in a “modern” framework. Testing it on the desktop (Chrome has a handle mobile emulation mode) it was blazingly fast.
First time I tried it on an actual phone, it sucked. Slow as all hell. It was fixable, but it required constantly developing and testing on phones. Yes, mobile websites can be fast and light, but you got to carefully test every freaking change on actual phones to make sure you haven’t introduced a performance issue, there’s just no performance headroom on mobile.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve been browsing the web on my phone and wondered “Has anyone at this company ever used this website on a phone?!” My favorite is the post-load kerchunk, as some ad loads and does a 1fps animation to expand, and suddenly the content you were reading jumps down 2 screens. You scroll down to it at 0.5 fps as the ad plays, then the ad collapses and your content jumps back up 2 screens. Fun times.
Firefox simply wins on Android because of extensions – something Chrome is criminally missing on the platform (has Google *ever* explained why it seems to have Chrome extensions on every platform except Android?).
Mind you, unlike desktop Firefox where I need about 6 or so extensions to revert theme annoyances, I find that Adblock Plus (though I also use Adaway globally now on top of that) and Phony (to force the desktop version on all sites by default) are the only extensions I need on my Android tablets.
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