Database Users

jaggy browser experience?

So I was really looking forward to getting a galaxy tab, primarily for web browsing. Then I saw this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvCXMARtl0
What is the deal with the stuttering jaggy web browsing experience? Can someone that has a tab let me know if a third party browser can make browsing a little less, bleh?

The Galaxy Tab has Flash running in on the webpage.
Look at 0:08 on the video, you can see on the iPad that there are two bars marked "FLASH" disabled. It's suppose to have the banner for "HTC" on it.

Yeah, flash is SERIOUSLY CPU heavy. In fact that's how apple justifies not using it on any of its mobile devices. On closer inspection, there's more than just two 'FLASH' bars on the iPad, I count at least 4.
If you want it to good THAT fast then turn flash off.
On the other hand, do you look at websites by pinging back and forth on them so fast you can't read the text ? Personally, I scroll slowly down, and only move quickly infrequently when I want to 'go to top' or 'go to bottom'. If you actually read websites, the video doesn't really show off a whole lot. Its not comparing like with like, and its not comparing a real life situation, so it doesn't matter.

I have the tab. Some sites with flash will run just fine.
Others will simply cause the browser to be unusable. I have no explanation to this.
I compare a site that is unusable on the tab with my Droid x and on the droidx the site runs just fine with flash enabled.
Maybe. This is a software issue which is unrelated to flash and can be fixed in a future firmware update.
Sent from my GT-P1000 using XDA App

clubtech said:
I have the tab. Some sites with flash will run just fine.
Others will simply cause the browser to be unusable. I have no explanation to this.
I compare a site that is unusable on the tab with my Droid x and on the droidx the site runs just fine with flash enabled.
Maybe. This is a software issue which is unrelated to flash and can be fixed in a future firmware update.
Sent from my GT-P1000 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Quote possibly. Samsung have been slow to release Froyo for the galaxy, so maybe the flash thing isn't just the Tab, its the architecture. Maybe they can't get the hummingbird GFX to accelerate properly.

I have a Tab since 1 week and yes...the browsing experience is really awful. it's a pain...it's slow in loading pages and VERY jaggy in scrolling.
If I think that it should be one of the best features on the Tab I'm very sad and I really hope that it will be fixed (ad least improved) soon in future releases!
By now I just can't leave my ipad for internet browsing.

It looks like both the SGS and the Tab are suffering from the same issue with the browser.
Samsung will have no choice but to fix this.

Dolphin and Opera
Yes browsing with stock browser is really slow and jaggy. I've installed Opera mini and Dolphin. I use Opera for casual browsing (ie xda) and it's really smooth. When I need flash, or for "difficult sites" or if I have to download with rapidhare etc I use Dolphin (which is almost smooth).

Thank you all for your honest opinions.

patomas said:
Yes browsing with stock browser is really slow and jaggy. I've installed Opera mini and Dolphin. I use Opera for casual browsing (ie xda) and it's really smooth. When I need flash, or for "difficult sites" or if I have to download with rapidhare etc I use Dolphin (which is almost smooth).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Dolphin uses the same core lib as the stock browser so it should run the same as stock in terms of speed.

clubtech said:
Dolphin uses the same core lib as the stock browser so it should run the same as stock in terms of speed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Didnt know. In practice it's really smoother though!

The webkit browser has a really annoying renderer in general. I dont understand why it needs to lower picture quality whenever you move the image around.
Just look at the way opera mini does it - much faster and better looking! Sadly its buggy and lacking in features, which is why im still using webkit.
Dolphin HD is slightly better (if only because it semi-blocks flash content by default), but it has some annoying ui elements like the giant tab bar, which can be removed but at the cost of being able to click on objects along the top edge of the display.
Ive also tried the ARM7 version of the mozilla fennec nighly builds. It just force closed on me, not even a little looksee

For me Dolphin HD is much smoother beside the fact it doesn't show flash banners where stock one does.
Both of them have been a disappointment WRT flash support.
It isn't that great for sites i visit.

If I open a new tap, I need to zoom in and out to get a picture
is this normal?

No, mine loads fine immediatley.

ftgg99 said:
No, mine loads fine immediatley.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
strange maybe this evening I'll do a HR
by the way I open the tabs not in front but in background. If I open it in front it will load

Xoom and XDA

My xoom seems to struggle navigating through xda. It is very slow and laggy and very tough trying to navigate through the site. Anyone else suffer through this ?
Thanks for any feedback.

how long have you had it?
What browser are you using?
Mine was horribly laggy for a day or two after I got it. I couldnt believe this tegra 2 device couldnt hang with my evo??
After a few days it really smoothed out in several ways, especially browsing the web.
Now it owns my evo, as it should

Go to the bottom of any FDA page and set viewing to "xda classic". Fixes the laggy experience.

sddenizen said:
Go to the bottom of any FDA page and set viewing to "xda classic". Fixes the laggy experience.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yup! This will fix it.

opera browser works nice with XDA site.

Tapatalk really work good...
Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk

jase33 said:
opera browser works nice with XDA site.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have to second that. opera works in web mode fine with all of the forums that I've tried..

Mine was slow as heck at first but after a day or two it started running great in stock browser, it coincided with my installing flash but I highly doubt it's related.

alias_neo said:
Mine was slow as heck at first but after a day or two it started running great in stock browser, it coincided with my installing flash but I highly doubt it's related.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can got to Settings ---> Applications ---> Browser ---> Clear cache. Did this couple of days ago and the browser seems scroll much smother.
You can also set Enable plug-ins in Browser advance settings to on demand. this will stop browser automatically loading flash contents.

Bigmille said:
You can got to Settings ---> Applications ---> Browser ---> Clear cache. Did this couple of days ago and the browser seems scroll much smother.
You can also set Enable plug-ins in Browser advance settings to on demand. this will stop browser automatically loading flash contents.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeh, like I said though, mine started slow and got faster, I didnt clear cache and didn't turn anything off or chance any settings, all I did was install flash. Weird, but I'm happy with the performance so far.

nebenezer said:
how long have you had it?
What browser are you using?
Mine was horribly laggy for a day or two after I got it. I couldnt believe this tegra 2 device couldnt hang with my evo??
After a few days it really smoothed out in several ways, especially browsing the web.
Now it owns my evo, as it should
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
NEBZ!!!!! Glad you came to the dark side

sddenizen said:
Go to the bottom of any FDA page and set viewing to "xda classic". Fixes the laggy experience.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Astonishing how much this setting helps. I recently switched to that a few days ago and I can now enjoy XDA on my tablet.
(While I'm a huge proponent for using Opera Mobile on Android 2.x, I don't like it for Honeycomb because it doesn't follow the normal text selection conventions in the OS and it isn't (yet) HW accelerated to my knowledge. Barring XDA 2010 theme on the XDA site, I get much better performance from the HC stock browser than Opera Mobile when on my tablet.)

Likewise, thanks for the tip on changing it to xda classic. Scrolling is much smoother on the stock browser now.

Thanks for all the advise and help really do appreciate it. I changed setting to classic and WOW makes a huge difference. I've had my xoom few weeks since it came out and love it. This was one of my complains because my brother owns an ipad and he uses my xoom to navigate through xda and always complains, now that is fixed Once Again THANKS ALL

The xda donate version (I thinks its offically called the premium app) works well on xoom.
Sent from my Xoom the way it should be, rooted and with SD card.

i had the laggy xda site too after i installed flash. Once I set web pages to use plugins on demand, (settings -> advanced -> enable plugins -> on demand), thepages load much faster and scroll smoothly. I think it was all the flash-based ads that were making the browser slow down.
I've noticed this helped other sites as well, so if you are experiencing browser lag on other sites, try this method. Hope it helps!

I had a similar experience with my Acer A500. Thanks for the suggestion about using the classic theme. With the XDA 2010 theme even entering text was a laggy chore, and that is with plugins set to on-demand. Switching to the classic theme solved the lag, and has made posting much more pleasant. I will share this information over in our neck of the woods.

i've also noticed that portrait scrolls better than landscape.

Thanks for the "XDA Classic Theme" tip!

XDA Forums are much better on 3.1

With the changes to WebView and 3.1's updated CSS support, I believe it's corrected many of the issues with XDA's forums on the Xoom.
I loaded it up and it's running 10x better. I can finally scroll smoothly through the forums without having to resort to the 'XDA Classic' theme.
This is great

But if on the verizon network, the forums suck up data quick with advertisements and peoples unnecissary footers.
Sent from my Xoom using XDA App

my ability to enter texts in the forums after upgrade stinks. Such a lag when typing to words being displayed

Browser rendering in general is much improved.
The vBulletin typing on sites like XDA is still unbearably laggy. There's a 2 second delay between key press and the letter appearing.
Sent from my Xoom

MikeyMike01 said:
Browser rendering in general is much improved.
The vBulletin typing on sites like XDA is still unbearably laggy. There's a 2 second delay between key press and the letter appearing.
Sent from my Xoom
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Glad I have seen this thx, thought my xoom was laggy, but if iit is ononly xda.......happy days.Except the whole double lletter ttyping tthing.... is there a fix for that?

i was gonna say the opposite really. Browsing these forums is unbeleivably laggy and typing messages is horrendous.
I was thinking maybe that was an issue with using the us software on my xoom, but I guess not.

Using Opera MINI on problem forums , seems to solve the input lag.
Hopefully the stock browser someday will work better.

browser is ok with the forums but the app always fc's when i login then try to open a thread

deleting text in a reply box is a nightmare

My experiences are similar. The text inputs are terrible... but with 3.1, the forum page rendering is much faster.
by the way, is it just me or it is common issue that my xda app downloaded from the Market ALWAYS fc if I logged in then next time I open it, I am guest in that app again...
In that way it successfully blocked every my effort to log in or save a favourite forum in my xoom through that app...
Any fix to this?
Thanks!

things are laggy. Actually suck. Before update it ran much better!! When I scroll down a page i get pink boxes really bad!! :-(

Pink boxes? The update actually made your device slower? Maybe you need to preform a factory reset
Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk

This happens all the time. Can't even use app on my xoom
Sent from my Atrix running Gingerblur

briansaul said:
This happens all the time. Can't even use app on my xoom
Sent from my Atrix running Gingerblur
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
XDA Premium works just fine, and has for some time.
Sent from my Xoom

At the bottom of the forums switch the view to XDA Classic. It isn't laggy at all for me after doing this.

I'm using the TDR 3.1 rooted kernel and the keyboard is fine. I experienced the lag on the BRD 3.1 rooted kernel. The TDR supports over-clocking and I just flipped that on, works great. I also use the SlideIT soft keyboard which is working nicely. I was having problems with long posts on phpbb forums before 3.1 which is no longer a problem, yay. Things are looking up.

Will browsing ever be good enough?

I'm going to start by saying I absolutely love my transformer... and am definetly going to stay and hope the platform will grow. But I don't think anyone will argue that browsing on it is not the same as a computer or even netbook. My grandma has a 400 dollar netbook and Still it outperformed the transformer. Im running Prime 1.4, overclocked to 1.6 and still it is not enough. Sites don't load correctly, things don't click, and just other stuff just doesn't work as it does on a real PC.
So my question is Do you guys think well ever get a full fledged browsing experience? I no this isn't a computer but it should be able to browse like one I think. And do you guys think these issues are more honeycomb related then hardware?
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

Sometimes things don't click because a lot of websites aren't exactly optimized for touches. Same reason we have problems with things that require mouse-hover functions.
Currently it's "good enough" for me, personally.

I've got a question regarding browser performance. Using the stock browser, when I scroll down a web page, there is a very noticeable lag in the newly exposed section filling in. For example, when I scroll down an XDA forum, the bottom of my screen is a blank brown/tan for a moment before anything loads. I tested the same sites on my dual core phone and there were no delays or visible blank spots when scrolling -it looks continous and smooth whereas the Transformer appears to be slowly loading each new section. I'm on my second unit and don't recall it being nearly as bad on the first. My keyboard lag is also ridiculous.
Is this experience common or do I again have a defective Transformer

That's common, try switching to xda classic at the bottom if you can't tolerate it. There its the xda app too.

i thinks its eather asus custome UI, even though its pretty vanilla, its still laggier than stock. that and HC is a bit laggier than phone ver. of Android. Just gotta wait for updates i guess.

Did I hear that hardware accerlation in the browser could b in I've cream sandwich? That will help surely.
Have to say I agree. My partner is getting pissed off with it as we sold our netbook for Thursday tf.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using XDA Premium App

i feel you with the things dont click, this is a problem with touch screens across all devices, other wise for a tablet the browsing is great. you shouldnt expect it to be up to par with a full operating system such as windows....yet

try opera browser instead

Opera does not support flash, but Flash in general is bad on Honeycomb, so you could argue that no browsers support it...
Opera has stated that it is because of Google not releasing the sources to Honeycomb, but that should change with Icecream Sandwitch (unless Google changes its mind again). It will take a while, early next year at the soonest.
If you can live without flash, Opera is indeed the best browser of the bunch.

I bet any tablet has that screen draw issue in browsers, my iPad does the same thing but instead of blank it's a checkerboard pattern, never really bugged me too much. I'm like Dolphin HD so far, I did really like Opera but it has a problem that makes me not use it. I like to use the trackpad with 2 finger swipe to move the page around which works fine in other browsers, butin Opera it's like a gesture that does some wierd thing so I quit using it.

darkonex said:
I bet any tablet has that screen draw issue in browsers, my iPad does the same thing but instead of blank it's a checkerboard pattern, never really bugged me too much. I'm like Dolphin HD so far, I did really like Opera but it has a problem that makes me not use it. I like to use the trackpad with 2 finger swipe to move the page around which works fine in other browsers, butin Opera it's like a gesture that does some wierd thing so I quit using it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I use opera mobile to open forums. smooth scrolling and no laggy page drawing. only use flash supported browser to stream videos.

i was annoyed by the slow browsing experience also using dolphin hd but i found that if you turn off JavaScript it significantly speeds up page loading.

Patience is a virtue...
Web browsing on android has came a very far way in just a few years. Microsoft had decades to optimize windows for browsing the web, android (especially honeycomb) just came into the game.
Web browsing works remarkably well when take into account that android (Once again, especially honeycomb) is still very much a premature OS still trying to iron out and optimize.
Don't get caught up in all the hype revolving around the hardware in android phones and benchmarks, etc. The hardware has never been the problem, once the software gets optimized and focused on web browsing will be just as good or even surpass OSx, ios and windows.

Links that don't react to clicking is probably not a touch screen problem but a bug in browser. In Dolphine when i use long tap and select "open in new window" it still doesn't open them many times. And new Dolphine proibably uses stack browser for viewing pages because it has the same problems as the stock browser.

Has anyone tried SkyFire? I t works quite well on my HD2 and has Flash support

You just have to try opera mobile! It is indeed the best brouwser for the transformer.

Yeah opera moblie seems to be the like the fastest browser among the stock and dolphina, but I don't heard alot of people complaining about the small font size. Am I crazy but the font is way to small on opera. So no one has issues with it? Increasing the font size from 9 to 12 does help but its not perfect.

Opera mobile not playing flash is a deal breaker. Fix it and most will move to opera.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using XDA Premium App

wouwout said:
Opera mobile not playing flash is a deal breaker. Fix it and most will move to opera.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using XDA Premium App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It does play flash. You have to enable desktop agent: http://articlecms.in/3691-how-to-run-opera-mobile-in-full-desktop-mode.html
"In the browser address bar type opera:config
Scroll down to User preferences and click on it
Scroll to custom user agent
Type this into the text box Opera/9.80 (Linux; en) Presto/2.7.81 Version/11.00
Click save
Restart the app"

I just find the browser to be slow. Sadly my notion ink adam broswer was much faster which was also running flash and was set fordesktop user agent

browser keyboard lag fix... kind of

I found this in one of the xoom forums
Type about:debug into browser bar
Nothing seems to happen
Go to menu>settings>debug
Disable opengl rendering
It's still not perfect but it is significantly better than it was for me
I'm no programmer so do any of you know what opengl does or if it will hinder the browser by disabling that function?
Disabling wide viewport makes the choppy page scrolling a bit more bearable

Does it affect any other performance?
Like the smoothness of page scrolling ... embedded YouTube playing ...
figurine said:
I found this in one of the xoom forums
Type about:debug into browser bar
Nothing seems to happen
Go to menu>settings>debug
Disable opengl rendering
It's still not perfect but it is significantly better than it was for me
I'm no programmer so do any of you know what opengl does or if it will hinder the browser by disabling that function?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Page scrolling is not as smooth
Viewing youtube videos in the browser doesn't work without it apparently
I'll probably keep it disabled for typing in forums and then toggle it on when i need it for videos. It feels pretty nice to have responsive keyboard presses

You know, I scratched my head thinking about this issue.
How is it possible this happened to a company like Google?
Didn't they test it?
I meant, come on! The problem is obvious and very easy to reproduce, they should have test the keyboard functionality on a web forum!
Probably they don't have test department ... or what???
Unbelievable
figurine said:
Page scrolling is not as smooth
Viewing youtube videos in the browser doesn't work without it apparently
I'll probably keep it disabled for typing in forums and then toggle it on when i need it for videos. It feels pretty nice to have responsive keyboard presses
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

It is pretty lame that I have to choose between typing and smooth page scrolling.
Until we get an update to fix the issue I'll keep turning opengl on and off accordingly.
I've tried other debug settings but to no avail

I haven't had (or maybe noticed due to the tracing input method) any keyboard lag using Swype. That was the first thing I installed after I powered up, so I can't compare with the stock keyboard. YMMV.
Also, you want to leave OpenGL enabled, as that is the hardware acceleration library. Would make sense that your page scrolling becomes choppy (and probably pegs your processor - and thus your battery - too). Maybe somebody more familiar with this can explain why there OpenGL would introduce keyboard lag.
Finally, it's annoying - very annoying sometimes - but Android and Google's products in general really are in a perpetual state of beta. It's irritating when you run into issues, but that's also how Android became the powerful (if unpolished at times) platform that it is today so quickly.

this is very annoying i dont know if i can put up with this lag. ive only had it for a day but i do alot of forum typing. might return it and reconsider something else

Most of my favorite forums use TapaTalk so I'm OK for now.
I've also gotten used to typing in a notepad app, then copy the text to the browser. I do that on my phone all the time. I mainly do it that way because I've responded to posts on my phone, hit the submit button, then the page does not load. Hit the back button & all my text is gone.
I've been copying to & from a notepad app for so long, it's not an issue for me at the time.

cdf3 said:
Most of my favorite forums use TapaTalk so I'm OK for now.
I've also gotten used to typing in a notepad app, then copy the text to the browser. I do that on my phone all the time. I mainly do it that way because I've responded to posts on my phone, hit the submit button, then the page does not load. Hit the back button & all my text is gone.
I've been copying to & from a notepad app for so long, it's not an issue for me at the time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lol I've had that happen to me so many times. Good way to get around it.
Sent from my GT-P7510 using Tapatalk

I'm not sure what lag we're talking about. I am using swift key beta split keyboard and notice no lag.
Sent from my SGH-T959V using XDA App

scoop_dtx said:
I'm not sure what lag we're talking about. I am using swift key beta split keyboard and notice no lag.
Sent from my SGH-T959V using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you notice it with the stock keyboards? I've used those plus thumb keyboard and still get lag

OpenGL is the hardware acceleration library for Android. For an application like the browser, there can be two implementations of the "drawing" code for the application. If you wanted to draw some text on the screen, you could use either a bunch of standard text widgets, or you could render the text like a game would - with OpenGL. OpenGL lets you do things that a game would want to do, like scroll the text, rotate it, scale it, etc.
The OpenGL implementation of the browser would be much faster, and lets the device offload a lot of the graphical elements to the GPU.
Perhaps the problem here is that the keyboard (not OpenGL) is being composited on top of the OpenGL browser. That compositing implementation may be borked, or may be done in the CPU rather than the GPU.
So: Who's fault is it? Hard to say. It could be Google's implementation of compositing, or it could be the hardware vendors' (Samsung or Nvidia) implementation of OpenGL for their hardware.
I wonder if other OpenGL apps do the same thing. Someone find a game or graphic intensive application that also uses the stock keyboard and see if you get lag there, as well.

Great insight. I just won an ipad2 and immediately bought the xoom with intention if selling the ipad2 and breaking even, but this keyboard lag is killing me! The ipad2 is so much smoother. Google needs to iron these things out if they expect to make a dent in the tablet market.

scriptx said:
Great insight. I just won an ipad2 and immediately bought the xoom with intention if selling the ipad2 and breaking even, but this keyboard lag is killing me! The ipad2 is so much smoother. Google needs to iron these things out if they expect to make a dent in the tablet market.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree with the lag issues in the web browser. Sometimes it's so bad, I tend to wonder if taking my iPad 2 back for the Tab was a wise decision. I really hope TouchWiz can address that issue.
Sent from my GT-P7510 using Tapatalk

I really am not having this issue
Sent from my GT-P7510 using XDA Premium App

i use dolphin HD as my web browser until they sort the stock browsers lag out.

scoop_dtx said:
I'm not sure what lag we're talking about. I am using swift key beta split keyboard and notice no lag.
Sent from my SGH-T959V using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I also use SwiftKey keyboard and notice plenty of lag. The so far stock has least amount of lag from the kb i've tried out