Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe now I'm a professional android guy for pocketnow.com but you might not know I'm also a professional web developer now what's a web developer well he's the guy or the gal that takes really nice designs from people with degrees in in fine arts and turns them into standards-compliant code that you eventually see in your web browser so that's what this video is going to be about it's about Android it's about browsers but it's about the stock browser that comes with most android-powered devices which is really just google chrome and mozilla firefox which is right now in beta on android but you probably know it from your desktop let's go take a look at why that's important and more important which one's faster okay before we get to speed test a little bit of background first and foremost what our web standards why are they important where do they come from now this is something i could write books about but i've only got a little bit of time in this video so let's just sum up really fast web standards are what we have now it's a specification for writing web pages now those pages have to follow certain rules for CSS for HTML for all that stuff that you guys don't need to know about but it came about really because way back in the day we had netscape navigator and we had a newcomer internet explorer and eventually the internet explorer became so dominant it crushed Netscape Navigator but before they died they rolled their code out their source code there rendering engine really what it is that displays the web pages well they've rolled that out to open source the Mozilla Foundation was born and they grew firefox firefox on the desktop was great it was an alternative for internet explorer you see internet explorer for that was revolutionary internet explorer 5 it was progress 55 that was a nice stable browser internet explorer 6 well that's the one the nail in the coffin netscape and really there wasn't any progress after that it's stagnated Microsoft rested on their laurels and they just didn't do anything then Firefox came around and all of a sudden it was a brand new game well we know now that Microsoft has been trying and trying and trying to catch up and release a web standards compliant browser you see chrome uses webkit Safari uses webkit Mozilla uses Mozilla Firefox uses Mozilla opera uses some weird amalgamation of WebKit we just want to talk about opera but they're all basically just web browsers that are trying to present web pages the way that the developer and the designer intended now that's easier said than done Microsoft has been trick playing catch-up internet explorer 7 on the desktop was atrocious Internet Explorer 8 which is what most of you have it comes a long way from seven but it's still not standards compliant it doesn't support css3 I mean that's insane ok and then internet explorer 9 it's a lot better but still not great windows phone still doesn't have a standards-compliant web browser in it and i'm sorry you guys I know that's going to offend some of you but it doesn't there will be an update that will bring that up to Internet Explorer 9 Lite if you want to call it that they'll come out later because well internet explorer 9 for desktop hasn't come out yet okay so enough about standards let's move on because that's way longer than I wanted to go so we've got browsers now browsers do things differently internet explorer built into Windows everybody has it except the Europeans who get a choice you guys are lucky over here we have to try and educate our consumers and say hey try chrome try opera try firefox try anything but what came with your machine firefox and chrome do things better and faster than internet explorer any version ridiculously faster so when we take that to a mobile device that's where it's really kind of a game changer because you know we have a small device with limited resources limited amount of RAM limited processor and really a limited pipe to get data we'll come back to that may be a little bit later but with all these limitations you need to be super fast not only do you have to render the page but you also have to scale it to fit that smaller screen if there's not a you know a native app version like pocketnow.com you go to pocketnow.com on your android you're going to get a mobile-friendly version of the site well not every site has done that so the browser has to figure out what it should look like on your little screen and then scale up and down it is really quite complex on Android the only choice that you've had really has been browser the one that comes with it now we've talked about skyfire we've talked about some others dolphin and whatnot and they're great browsers but they're still kind of Fringe browsers like opera they're just kind of a fridge they appeal to a certain set of people they have some benefits they have some disadvantages but now we've got major muscle come into the game and that's Mozilla Mozilla for handhelds used to be called fennec that was the code name and they decided to rename it to just Firefox that makes sense the desktop versions popular why not have the same version on your mobile so there's all the background you need we just had a new beta come out for firefox i believe is 4.5 beta and that's really what we want to see so there's all of your big long introduction if you didn't want to hear it I assume you skipped it up until this point so what we're going to do now is I've got a nexus one running cyanogenmod 7 Gingerbread and I've got a g2 running cyanogenmod gingerbread they're both clocked basically the same speed gigahertz 2 gigahertz they're both connected to the same Wi-Fi network so we should have pretty much the same speed rendering pretty much the same speed network wise and we're going to go through and run not only some compatibility tests but we're also going to run some speed tests so let's go ahead and get right to that all right using setcpu for root users I'm gone ahead and set these so they're clocked the same minimum speed is going to be 245 megahertz maximum speed is going to be just over 1 gigahertz so they're running at the same core speed so we're looking at the app drawer right now on one side we've got a TW and launched on the other side we've got launcherpro not really that important we're going to go ahead and fire up browser on this side and firefox on this side just so you can see how fast each one of them opens now I've gone ahead and rebooted both of the phones right now so neither one of them has anything recently loaded there's nothing pre cached so you're going to see how long it takes to do the initial load and I'll see if I can do this at the same time so we open that up now you notice right here immediately it launches the browser it goes to google over here we have to load and load and load until finally we get that so first load obviously goes over to Google's browser and Firefox comes in a disappointing second place the web standards project has put together lots of different tests to make sure your browser is rendering stuff correctly and all this is a web page that has a bunch of stuff on it a bunch of HTML code CSS JavaScript and whatnot and it has a reference rendering how it should render and then it lets your your phone or your computer render it so let's go ahead and run this and see how they do so over here this came up hello world really fast and for some reason browser is not running it for some reason which is really interesting so the next test run of course is acid 3 let's go ahead and run that now acid 3 acid three and over here says the browser is 93 out of a hundred so I'm not bad over here took a little bit more time to complete but we got 90 seven out of one hundred percent so very good over here a little bit better on the Firefox side than on the browser side of things and a lot better of course over here on the the Firefox side compared to browser in the acid to test next up we've got html5 test com what this website does is it checks your browser for html5 compatibility now recently html5 was renamed just HTML but i think the html5 moniker is going to stick around for a little while so let's go ahead and go on both of these much faster over here on the browser side of things a little bit slower on the firefox side but you can see obviously 176 out of 300 points with one bonus point 207 with nine bonus points out of it 300 so much better html5 support on firefox than on browser this next test is a vulnerability test it's by B check dot scan it dot B II and what we've done here is we've loaded up and we said we want to run all available tests it's noted that the browser name version and platform for both of these so I was incorrect this is version 4.0 beta 5 i think i mentioned that incorrectly earlier in the video let's go ahead and start the test for all available tests now this is going to try and crash the browser and that's what that message just said opens up a new tab which over here it's showing you kind of a modal window and it says please don't close this window while the browser test is running it's being used by the test so we're going to go ahead and let that run now this takes a little bit of time so what i'm going to do is go ahead and pause let the test run and then i'll report back with the results okay now with that last test neither browser crashed the both of them came up with unable to display page on numerous occasions which is really a good thing it can't display pages that might be potentially harmful to to the device so all in all they tied in that test next test up is SunSpider SunSpider is a JavaScript benchmarking utility to see how fast the browser runs java script so the latest version is 0.9 point 1 let's go ahead and start SunSpider now a little bit faster over here off the up the start on browser Firefox still looks like it's trying to think about it and this is kind of boring what it's doing is it's running through all these different JavaScript functions some people call them methods but they're really functions in JavaScript to do stuff like string dot catenate math dot round math dot floor just all of these things that it's running through and running the tests to see how fast it can do all these things and it's got a little timer down here i'll see if i can zoom in a little bit to show you that so far so good i mean it's cranking through this it's not all that exciting because it's just running through those functions behind the scenes and updating the screen with what it's running and how long it took to complete now over here on Firefox this is the same test and it hasn't even started apparently so I don't know if this version of firefox mobile is incompatible with SunSpider which would be a shame that doesn't bode well or if there's just some other problem but let's go ahead and let things run and see how browser does and see if firefox catches up and starts to run it now even though it didn't show anything on the screen Firefox actually came through and completed in approximately two thousand seven hundred and seventy nine milliseconds with a margin error on that of plus or minus 3.6 percent over here on browser however it showed us what it was doing but it only took quite a bit longer at 4710 milliseconds with a margin of error plus or minus seven point nine now to compare that over on my desktop machine running the latest version of Chrome it's a dual core machine with two gig of ram I was able to complete the test in 627 milliseconds plus or minus one percent margin of error so significantly faster over there most likely due to the dual core but over here you can see big difference about twice as long over on browser as it was over on Firefox now that might have been because this was doing screen updates over on the browser browser whereas this wasn't doing any browser any screen updates in the Firefox browser so that might have had something to do with it so there's a whole bunch of tests whether you like benchmarks or not they're what they are and you can kind of see whether each one of them ranks now you're probably not going to go out and do this on your own so let's get into to just wrap this up some real-world sites let's go to the same site on both of the browsers and see which comes up faster so you can get a feel of which one actually is going to look like it performs faster to the end user all right so we're going to try and go to apple.com over here in browser it's up immediately just like that over here on Firefox nothing now this is not because Firefox can't display the apple website or even the pocket now website this is a bug with the beta version of the software where sometimes it will resolve the page and it won't display anything at all and then what you need to do is exit the browser and restart it so let me go ahead and do that and let's rerun this test and see what we can get now instead of closing the browser and reopening it what I did was I swiped over to the side and I had a few tabs open and when I say a few mean there were a total of three and apparently that was too much for the browser to handle so Firefox choked on that and it wasn't able to display the page so let's go ahead and refresh this over here and just so you can see how fast it loads we'll go ahead and go on that to see how fast that one loads as well not at the same time obviously but they both come up and they both render the page pretty much the same now in all fairness let's go ahead and look at another website similar to apple and see how they do so let's go ahead and try and go to microsoft com Firefox got a little bit of a head start on that button push over here it says that mobile microsoft com wants my location do I want to share that or not it also says the same thing over here in browser so I'm going to share my location with that just because we can now if you notice the pages are fully loaded they look a lot different over here in browser it seems to look a little bit better than over in Firefox if we zoom and try and get this to resize now it's not looking all that great so they loaded about the same time but definitely browser looks a little bit better if you compare that to browser on the other hand this is on the phone already the total including data and application is 2.0 of 7 megabytes so quite a difference there on the factor of about seven times bigger for Firefox than for browser and then the cash to do exactly the same thing was only 4.5 two megabytes versus over here was quite a bit more than that so which one should you use it's up to you i would recommend a browser because it seems faster on both of these phones but if you want to go for raw speed again go with firefox because it's more standards-compliant at least in this iteration and because it's an option it's an alternative it's got some neat you I things that browser doesn't have which we didn't go into because this video was about speed and compatibility so go ahead and try firefox out if you haven't let me know what you think that's what the comments are for down at the bottom so make sure you leave us feedback what do you think about browser versus Firefox is there a test that we should have run that we didn't is there something you'd like to see or is there another browser that you run other than these two that is faster or better and why let us know in the comments down below of course if you like seeing these kind of speed comparisons and compatibility comparison videos give us a thumbs up so we know that you want us to keep shooting them head on over to pocketnow.com so you can see the write-up on this particular article and I'll have links to those tests so if you want to run them on your own mobile phone or even on your desktop computer you'll be able to do that as well be advised that now one test the vulnerability test it tries to crash your computer and if your browser isn't up to date and if your antivirus software isn't up to date it probably will so I'm just going to put that out there right now so a whole bunch of information I hope you liked it of course if you've got any feedback at all leave those in the comment as in the comments section as well and for pocket now I'm Joe Levi