A few years ago, mobile Internet on the phone could only cause a desire to kill yourself. Yes, and you had to be a big fan in order to make out in that incomprehensible gray poop on a tiny screen that very cherished "Internet"!
But the development of mobile technologies and the expansion of mobile frequencies allow us to say that more and more phones can give us real Internet, in all its colors.
In this review, we tested eight common mobile browsers. Some of them only made us smile, while others showed that the correct display of HTML is not enough for a complete sense of the Internet.
Well, what about the confrontation between 3G and Wi-Fi?? All that manufacturers say is a lie! Everything is decided by the mobile web!


Before moving on, a small test on the speed of loading and display of several well-known sites.

Legend:
The first number shows the page loading speed in seconds;
The display of each page ranges from “Poor” to “Excellent”;
Colors (red, yellow, green) show a general rating, including page speed and page rendering accuracy:
Green = all is well, Red = all is bad.



The second plate shows the same thing, but with the function of accessing the Internet via Wi-Fi:



And now in more detail:

Android

Fast smart mobile browser based on WebKit. He pounces on sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Navigation and scaling of pages could be a little smoother and more manageable, but tons of settings, various ways of moving with a touchscreen and joystick allow you to climb sites quickly and conveniently. The only thing that we have not tried is the multi-touch zoom . The buttons do not work too neatly, and although viewing pages through the "magnifying glass" is quite convenient, you expect something more elaborate from the android.

But in general, we consider ourselves the happy owners of Android! :)

Rating: 4+

BlackBerry with Bold Browser

Despite the hindrances and limitations that BlackBerry users have been facing for years, the browser displays most of the pages correctly, although scripts can cause seizures in the browser (for example, Wikipedia and WSJ have been loading on it for an extremely long time). It uses the standard “click to enlarge” principle, which works well, although running through the page with the joystick will make the thumb work pretty well.

The “column” view, which compresses the entire contents of the page into one column, is very convenient and allows you to climb wide pages, however, it does not always work equally well (excellent with Wikipedia, bad with Giz).

Fortunately, the execution of the scripts was improved on Storm (BlackBerry Storm - the next “killer" of the iPhone - approx. Transl.), Which uses an updated version of the Bold browser.

We modestly hope that BlackBerry will nevertheless abandon their homegrown browser and move on to a single WebKit!

Rating: 4- / 3 +

iPhone

What can I say? This is still the best browser!
In terms of speed, he defeated literally everyone except, except Android, (which is also built on WebKit), and bypasses his half-brother (as well as everyone else) with an easy and elegant multi-touch zoom . Some pages are still crooked and there is no support for Flash , but it really gives an unrivaled opportunity to use the Internet on your mobile.

We love him! But deep down we are waiting for the appearance of something better ( maybe Mobile Firefox ?)

Rating: 5-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60

ABOUT! See, another browser with a WebKit engine! (note transl.: here it means that Nokia has launched its browser for S60 in open source : a proof-link )
It is not as good as Android or iPhone, neither in speed nor in page rendering (maybe some of the Symbian guys will explain why?), but does its job well.
And yes! He can work with Flash! To do this, he uses Flash Lite 3, although he does it through w .. badly and with a lot of memory load.

Navigation on the E71 is more convenient on the buttons than using the joystick. The viewing mode through the "magnifying glass" is quite convenient (though you have to climb several menus to turn it on).

The result is not bad, but far from excellent.

Rating: 4-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile

Oh my God! This is a joke, huh? Melkosoft? MUAHAHA!
No, really, this is the worst mobile browser on the whole planet. He does not know how to display anything except, perhaps, pseudographics. He terribly screwed up on all simple tests, except for Wikipedia, which he just screwed up heavily.
And oh, a miracle! Navigating the page, if a UFO arrives and displays it normally, is quite usable.

Rating: 2-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile

With Windows Mobile, normal Internet access is also possible, for this you need to install Opera Mobile on it. He nevertheless podriyivaetsya on the  back ... unfinished Windows Mobile, but usually does its job normally. Not as great as his WebKit counterparts, but you can definitely use it.

Interestingly, when switching to Wi-Fi access, Opera Mobile's speed grew more noticeably than that of WebKit browsers.

Zoom through the menu quickly got tired, but the touch navigation works fine, although it messes up a bit. We tested navigation on the Samsung Epix optical cursor - it works great, somewhere between the d-pad and the joystick.

Rating: 3


(Note. Transl .: Next are two beasts that we will not find on our shelves, Samsung Instinct - a model released by Samsung in conjunction with the American operator Sprint , and LG Dare for Verizon and directly sharpened for their services. Phones belong to the so-called specialized class phones (feature phones) ; maybe someone else remembers “our” miracle-i-mode phones ;)?)

Samsung (Sprint) Instinct

Ha! This is not the lousy browser that recently came with Instinct.

The original was slow and weak, even though it was the flagship of its class (dumb phones;). But with the new update (to version 1.1), the browser has really changed a lot.
It was at the bottom of the chart, because it is much slower than its counterparts, and the zoom works somehow ridiculously. But, as soon as the page loads, climbing on it becomes easy and convenient.
A bit annoying is the download bar, which hangs at the last 2 percent in the middle of the process, but more or less it corresponds to the load state.

This is (probably) the best non-smartphone browser you can find.

Rating: 3+

LG Dare

Just like Instinct, LG Dare has shown that a good browser can also be on a feature phone.
Dare is a little bit older than his Korean brother in page loading, but he got lower grades than Instinct. On "heavy" sites, he simply lost control: the page turned into a still picture and did not react to anything. However, the browser displays most pages neatly enough.

We liked the moving zoom bar, in any case, the idea of ​​such a work with scale seems very intuitive. Unfortunately, in practice, this works like a regular pair of buttons (“+” / “-”).

(Note: I don’t think that the download speed on this phone really reached 300 Kbps - most likely, there were some problems with working with the  DSL Report )

Rating: 3

Testing methodology

We tested each browser only on full non-mobile versions of sites, via 3G and, where possible, via Wi-Fi.
All scripts were included and before each pass the cache was cleared.
We took the average of a series of 5 consecutive tests for speed, in order to understand what bandwidth we are dealing with, and tracked the time during which the browser completely loaded the page along its loading bar.
We evaluated whether the browser correctly displayed the page on a scale from "excellent" to "good" (oops, I missed something) to "decidedly bad."

Sprint Instinct and Verizon Dare, which we included in the tests as the best models of their class (feature phones class), did not have Wi-Fi support.

We also did not include Opera Mini and Skyfire , because they do most of the work on their servers, which give out something like a picture. Moreover, we believe that this type of Internet through proxy browsers will not last long.

Breath of air

Remember our mantra “only code matters” (“code that counts” - the article told whether it’s necessary to switch to iPhone 3G and what can give ordinary iPhone 2.0 a comment. Transl.)? This is true for mobile internet in general. A cool browser can work on a mediocre internet, while a bad browser will give out nonsense at a good speed.

In the current state of affairs, WebKit is perhaps the best solution that has been invented. But even so, the existing software requires implementation (implementation), or it remains to be expected when Nokia will be able to present us functionality at the level of Android and iPhone.

Well, to prove how little Wi-Fi actually differs from 3G: in tests for speed, WebKit browsers on 3G overtook some of the browsers on Wi-Fi!

Another interesting thing that I would like to draw attention to is the principle of zoom. The buttons for the zoom turned out to be too brutish and the magnifying glass was too inaccurate. It seems that the best concept for zoom is multi-touch : it is both accurate and intuitive.
We hope that other developers will also begin to use multi-touch interfaces on touchscreen phones (* khe-khe * ANDROID! * Khe-khe *).

These are the problems that we were able to see during our review. The big picture is that the mobile Internet is becoming more interesting and colorful. It could still be even more reliable, faster, perhaps more flexible, but in most cases, yes, you can use the Internet in your mobile phone!
A comparison with the situation two years earlier already says a lot.
Who knows what will happen in a couple of years? Perhaps Internet Explorer will work fine?
Although numb! It's more of a science fiction kind of thing! ;)


(note perev .: further a little gag)

A carriage turns into a pumpkin or a few words about our realities

Well, drool over beautiful iPhones, blackbury and touchscreen samsungs?
3G and Wi-Fi talking? GPRS catches and thanks for that! ;)

So, we have:

The most-most devices in Russia (according to the statistics of the opera )

Nokia 6300, Nokia N73, SE K790i, Nokia 5310, Nokia 6233, SE K750i, SE K550i, SE W910i

Sales (correct me those who know better), something around this:
Nokia 6300, SE X1 Xperia, Nokia E51, iPhone, Samsung SGH-i910, Nokia 3109, BlackBerry Storm

On average, a Russian has a mobile Internet speed of 70-80 kbit / s and generates (oh my gosh !) 7 Mb of traffic per month.

And now let’s release our “flagships” into the arena , if not iPhones, but also handsome, meet (!):Nokia 6300 and Nokia N73 .

Instead of 3G - ordinary GPRS ( rainfall EDGE).

Instead of Gizmo and Slate - Contact and Mail.ru, of course, Habr!

And yes! Browsers! Instead of Safari and Android, let's take Opera Mini (4.2) prematurely thrown overboard and look at what built-in browsers are capable of.

Well then (* rubbing our hands *), let's start:

Legend (again):
The first number shows the page loading speed in seconds;
The display of each page ranges from “Poor” to “Excellent”;
The colors (red, yellow, green) show a general rating, including page speed and page rendering accuracy:
Green = all is well, Red = all is bad.



Nokia N73 Symbian S60

Built-in N73 web browser (actually there are two of them, the second is hidden in the depths of the menu and serves more for wap-internet). It does not have the abundance of settings that Opera has only the most necessary.
The browser honestly downloaded all 3 and a half megabytes of data from the Gizmodo main page, spending five minutes and a bunch of RAM for everything. At the same time (apparently due to clogged memory), the images did not appear.
But in general, the page rendered neatly. In addition, unlike OM, the Nokia browser displayed all scripting stuff well.
On mail.ru there was a feeling that the phone would explode from tension, but after five minutes ( lo and behold !) The shoe hit the bold page and stuck it in the browser screen.
Wikipedia (an article about the Hubble) opened wonderfully, but again for a long time. D-o-o-l-o-o-o!

Opera Mini

Opera we tested in two modes: with low-quality pictures and in hq . And as you could already notice from the tablet, I simply brought pages to the screen in a hurricane!
Yes, in speed Opera managed to get around even the iPhone, and this is on the usual GPRS cutter .
So what, that the scripts on the page froze, like in stone, so what, that in Netgeo the menu crawled a little on the text, and Wikipedia became two-column?
In most cases, all this is more than enough for ordinary surfing on your favorite sites.
And let aesthetes admire the beautiful markup on the desktop screens!)

For those who want more details and numbers here .

Another review from this series, with a focus on windows mobile here .