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Why can no android phones scroll through webpages without lag?

The processor in the LG Ally also has a good deal to play with that lag. Low end price phones will lag, no matter what. It's a matter or what you can do to minimize it with them. The high to mid price range phones, it's not an issue. If you do want the super smooth scrolling the iPhone has, like everyone else has stated, just use a stripped-down feature free browser. No more text re-flow, no more flash, limited everything, at the benefit of scrolling smooth. Almost all android phones are capable of being as smooth as the iPhone in everything, it's just a matter of finding stuff that's as stripped down as the iPhone software is. Oh well, I'll continue using my 'choppy' and 'slow' browser and what have you. Lol.
 
Guamguy said:
To the OP, browsers like Dolphin Browser, Dolphin Browser HD and Dolphin Browser HD Mini don't lag. Neither does Skyfire and Miren. The fastest renderers IMO after Opera Mini, are Dolphin Browser HD, Skyfire and Miren. The plain Dolphin Browser 3.0 is best for sharing.
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Not sure about the others, but Dolphin HD doesn't even use its own rendering. It just wraps around the stock browser. This can easily be seen on my Incredible when switching between the stock ROM and CM7. The stock browsers behave differently when panning/zooming, and Dolphin HD uses whatever panning/zooming/rendering traits the stock browser of that ROM uses.

So it seems to me that the Dolphin browsers are nothing more than enhancements for the stock browser, with HD offering the most enhancements.
 
I never see real lag on most pages, I can load the full web pages and not notice it. I have an original Desire. It's pretty good though admittedly not as good as iOS. Even when watching a youtube video in the full site scrolling etc is still fast (just choppy). I use Dolphin Mini btw.

I can see how it might be a dealbreaker for you when it comes to phones with below 1ghz processors, but that and above is more than good enough. Apple's lack of lag is admirable though. My first gen iPod Touch scrolls through lists slightly faster and smoother than my HTC Desire. Of course it's not enough to matter and my Desire is constantly multitasking so...
 
Opera and turning off flash solved the problem for me. Opera even handles flash better than any other android browser. Flash is actually usable in opera. While most websites for me are equally smooth in mobile websites that use no flash, in full featured desktop websites with or without flash on, none of the other browsers beat opera in speed. Not firefox, not dolphin, and not the default browser, opera is the only browser that can match the buttery smoothness of safari on the iphone. Also, get the full opera mobile over opera mini, unless you are on a really really slow phone on really slow 3g and never use wifi. You want the better html 5 support in the full version and you can still turn off flash if you want the websites to be smoother.
 
My phone works great with Dolphin HD, no lag or anything. Though it's still 2.1 so there's no flash to speak of.

Perhaps it's a matter of phone specs.
 
ambientdroid said:
My phone works great with Dolphin HD, no lag or anything. Though it's still 2.1 so there's no flash to speak of.

Perhaps it's a matter of phone specs.
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Even on websites without flash, opera is still smoother. I advise everyone who haven't already to try opera. It makes mobile sites useless because u can zip around and zoom in and out of full websites with ease. It's like turning smooth scrolling on and off in your firefox desktop browser
 
I've tried Opera (both versions) and find it no smoother than Dolphin or Browser. Your mileage may vary. Go ahead and try it, but not everyone's experience is the same as mttfrog13's.

In fact, I got weird font issues when scrolling in Opera, where certain lines would overlap with other lines, making the text unreadable.
 
i have an evo and my son has an iphone4. and we both agree my evo has no lag, plus we have also noticed that the evo even scrolls faster. it seems like the iphone4 will only scroll so fast which is in reality is not fast. we have had races with very large web pages that you really have to do alot of scrolling to get to the bottom. and my evo wins all the time. the iphone will only scroll so fast while the my evo just zooms really quick all the way down. i think 1 of the reasons the iphone seems so smooth is because of the speed at which it will scroll, which is not very fast. hence it dosen't lag cause it is really not scrolling that fast. try it you'll see what i mean. with just 1 really fast swipe of my finger i can get all the way down with my evo. while my son with his iphone will have to swipe multiple times before he hits the bottom.
 
Microsoft has this crazy HTML5 hardware rendering test using the browser. Since they cooked up the test on their own, naturally their phones (with Mango browser demonstration) would win. But what is surprising is that the Nexus S actually came out ahead of the iPhone 4. Figure it out.
 
eluno said:
i have an evo and my son has an iphone4. and we both agree my evo has no lag, plus we have also noticed that the evo even scrolls faster. it seems like the iphone4 will only scroll so fast which is in reality is not fast. we have had races with very large web pages that you really have to do alot of scrolling to get to the bottom. and my evo wins all the time. the iphone will only scroll so fast while the my evo just zooms really quick all the way down. i think 1 of the reasons the iphone seems so smooth is because of the speed at which it will scroll, which is not very fast. hence it dosen't lag cause it is really not scrolling that fast. try it you'll see what i mean. with just 1 really fast swipe of my finger i can get all the way down with my evo. while my son with his iphone will have to swipe multiple times before he hits the bottom.
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Scrolling speed, yes, Evo scrolls much faster than the iPhone due to better software design: if you scroll while the screen is already scrolling, you will get it to scroll even faster. And once scrolling, it stays fast longer. On the iPhone, there is a slower max scroll speed, and it decelerates much faster if you stop scrolling it. That's Android's advantage but has nothing to do with the lag that the OP describes.

There's no question that the max framerate of the iPhone is superior than any Android phone I've ever seen. I believe this is what the OP was referring to. "Lag" is a different issue. If your device is perfectly displaying 30fps, there is no lag. But that doesn't mean that the iPhone at 60fps doesn't look smoother than your device. Plus, it's been proven over and over again that some people (a lot) can't tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, while others think the difference is night and day.

So there's a lot of subjectivity around this subject. But there's no question that due to iDevices hardware graphics acceleration, things are actually much smoother than Android graphics. I haven't played with a new-gen (dual core) Android yet. Hopefully the gap has narrowed.
 
novox77 said:
There's no question that the max framerate of the iPhone is superior than any Android phone I've ever seen. I believe this is what the OP was referring to. "Lag" is a different issue. If your device is perfectly displaying 30fps, there is no lag. But that doesn't mean that the iPhone at 60fps doesn't look smoother than your device. Plus, it's been proven over and over again that some people (a lot) can't tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, while others think the difference is night and day.
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You're exactly right. I play a lot of video games on consoles and pc, so I can easily tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps or even when a game dips from 30 to 25 fps. I think that the issue with the "appeared" lower fps in browsers doesn't have to do with fps but the # of lines the browser skips at a time. The fewer lines, the "smoother" the scrolling. There may be some details involved not worth getting in, dealing with how far zoomed in u are while scrolling.

That said, I not only think opera has smoother scrolling due to it having smaller intervals in the scrolling, but it has less of the traditional "lag" caused by flash or very detailed websites. I think the engine in opera simply has better performance with javascript allowing the developers to put ur phone's cpu to other uses like smoother scrolling.

Also I will say that I originally had problems with opera rendering websites right but lately, after some updates, it has gotten better.
 
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