People who remember the stock browser that came with all Android phones would know how torturous it was to surf the internet on it. It was slow and temperamental. But after Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, it was replaced with Chrome for Android. And it was an improvement by miles! But Chrome for Android looks good only when compared with its predecessor. Judged on its own, the browser is still lacking in performance.
Most Android users would have experienced a strange lagging when they surf using Chrome on their smartphones. The browser is quick to load the web pages, but when you scroll through the webpage the browser starts stuttering. Sometimes it just gets stuck, other times you get a choppy looking page. This is a very unusual behaviour from a browser which is usually so fast on computers.
Another area where Chrome shows sluggish behaviour is when resizing a page. When pinching to zoom in and out on a page, the browser gets stuck for a few seconds before rendering the re-sized page. This feature is especially annoying because the old, stock Android browser actually used to perform a lot better in this area. And this also proves that it’s not a hardware problem.
These problems seem to arise due to lack of memory which causes the browser to slow down when scrolling and resizing. There are many ways to resolve this, most of which involves allocating more RAM to the browser. But the question still remains as to why Google is not doing anything about this problem? Instead, they are continuing to ship their new Nexus devices, Nexus 6 and 9, with Chrome.
Does Google not recognize this as an issue and is ignoring it? Or does it not have a solution to it at all? Whichever it is, one thing is for sure — unless Google does something about Chrome’s lagging issues, Android users will start moving to another browser and lose faith in Chrome.
In the end, just how we think email on Android sucks (most of you agree with us), we also feel that Chrome on Android sucks! What do you think?
