Iconic

A-를 맞은 아이폰 브라우저... B+을 맞은 안드로이드 브라우저...
F+도 아니고 F-를 맞은 삼성의 IE 브라우저...

[Mobile Browser Battlemodo: Which Phones Deliver The Real Web] - 출처 : gizmodo

Before2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to killyourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered acrossthat tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination ofincreased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phonesreally are promising to deliver the real internet, in livingcolor. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles onour faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cryfrom actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3Gvs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is thetrue state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of eachof the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked upin a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites,chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY:Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page renderingis rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red,yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account bothspeed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:
It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:

Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most siteswith (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could besmoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for gettingaround a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will bechallenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouchfor zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, andwhile the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd lovesomething a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers onAndroid's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up withfor years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it aconniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ).It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough,though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a workout for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into asingle column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get aroundwider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site(nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the scriptperformance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of theBold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browserfor one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. Itcrushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also basedon WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classybrother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease andelegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, andit's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaledmobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerlywaiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't performquite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or renderaccuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it doesa serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive.Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, butthe whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around(too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad,but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, thisis the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render itsway out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every singletest page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwedup. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculousoccurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you canuse the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile.It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but itusually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately asits WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, itbenefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKitbrowsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-basedpanning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated withthe Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewherein between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browserreally is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it'smuch slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, butonce the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually movearound. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hangingat the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but itusually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser youcan get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usablebrowsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler atloading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimatelyposts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easilyunder a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsivepicture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it rendersmost pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar,at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal withthe zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair ofbuttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobilespeedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions ofselected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts wereturned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. Wetook the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give usan idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it tookto completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. Weassessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scaleranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to"utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additionalissues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes,our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested itmight be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of howIE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dogpoo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads.Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones,don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire,since they both leave most of the hard work to servers whichessentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think thiskind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. Anawesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terriblebrowser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is.It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the bestthing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokiawould deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving thepoint, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that wererunning on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail.Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouchseems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that'sintuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start touse multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones(*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blowbattlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big pictureis that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and gettingdandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little moreversatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet onyour phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really sayingsomething. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years.Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.