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The best browser for your Android phone!

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: The experience of browsing on a smart device may not equate with browsing on a PC. However, there are plenty of browsers available today that offer advanced functionality with varying feature sets. It all depends on what you value most while surfing Net.

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With Froyo and Gingerbread having native support for Adobe Flash 10.1, you can have the rich multimedia experience through your Android phone's browser now. But if you're fond of suring too much of Internet, the stock browser may not be a good choice.

It also hogs memory; you can't close the browser once you are done with your Internet activity, it keeps running in background. Some third-party browsers addressed this issue by incorporating an option to exit the application and also to clear up the cache once you are done with your work, so as to free the system memory.

Having said that, the best thing with Android is that you have the choice to use other third-party browsers like Opera Mobile, Dolphin HD, etc available in Android Market. These browsers, with features like multiple tab support, bookmark syncing, gesture controls, etc give you much greater web surfing experience.

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Here we chose only the popular browsers in the Android Market that have more than 250,000 downloads. To test their performance, we used SunSpider JavaScript benchmark to check the JavaScript processing speed of the browser. Also, as these mobile browsers support HTML5 and Flash, we used Peacekeeper Browser benchmark to evaluate the overall performance by testing for rendering capability, DOM operations, handling complex graphics, etc.

We used LG Optimus Black P970 phone to install these browsers for benchmarking. And before benchmarking, most of the other background applications were killed using Advanced Task Killer app to ensure no or minimal interference while benchmarking was under process.

So, hopefully these results will give you an understanding of the pros, cons, features and the performance speed of the alternative Android browsers.

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Next: Review: Opera Mobile 11.10...

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Opera Mobile 11.10

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If not in PC browser space, Opera has been able to lead and capitalize on the mobile browser space. The Opera Mobile browser is quick and offers the same feel as that of Opera's PC browser with the familiar speed-dial as start page.

The browser has a sleek interface and offers pinch to zoom or double-tap to zoom in/out of the page. While reading a particular column, the words are wrapped around to fit into the display screen so that you need not have to scroll right-left to read the content. On customization front, it lags much behind Dolphin HD.

Another drawback is that it offers Google search only through the Search Bar, while with Firefox or Dolphin, it can be customized to user's preferred search engine. The browser's support for Flash add-on helps load the page content fast while the Flash content get downloaded when you tap on waiting icon.

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Like Firefox, this browser is also heavy at about 12MB in size, and when started it takes up 17MB of memory. In overall performance, it scores the highest and in SunSpider JavaScript processing test it's second only to Firefox.

In all, the quickest browser that can offer full multimedia support to the users and that's why highly recommended as an alternative browser to your phone's stock Android browser.

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