…or, Does Firefox Android Really Suck This Bad?
So, I’m a year and a half into my Note II and tend to do a lot of morning/evening/fireside browsing on it. I try to force sites to the desktop format whenever I can, because mobile layouts are sucky and crippled. I don’t mind zooming and panning as needed, and many sites are completely usable with the phone in landscape mode.
I found Dolphin and the Dolphin Jetpack early on and have used it exclusively… but recent updates and some persistent bugs have me on the hunt again. Dolphin did everything well, but it increasingly gave weird web errors (304? “Did not send complete command in time”?), locked up, and was very, very fussy about connecting to an in-house server portal.
So I installed Chrome and Firefox and have been switching those and the default system browser out of the hot slot on about a one-day cycle.
Dolphin persists in being buggy.
Android browser feels like an unfinished tool, although it will often connect to the in-house site when Dolphin chokes.
Chrome works well. I just don’t care for the Googleversness of it… e.g., bookmarks are unnecessarily difficult to manage without going to full sync, which I don’t want to do. It also has some weirdity about fonts and desktop/mobile site choices. It’s the best of the four, though.
Firefox… I’ve used FF since it was released. Wouldn’t use anything else on the desktop, and I do occasionally spend a day or two with one of the others. But FF mobile is so awkward and buggy it drives me crazy. Its rendering engine seems to be finding font code no other browser does - the SMDB in particular comes through as such a patchwork of font sizes it looks like Cecil is sending me a ransom note. Probably four or five point/size variations in any given page. Other oddities about how it loads stuff, and sometimes it just freezes and refuses to load pages no other browser has ever had a problem with.
So: Is Firefox Android just teh suck, and is there anything as reliable and smooth as Chrome without being so <fx Fonz comb through hair> Gooooogly? </fx?