If you’ve got an Android, device, there’s a good chance it spends a lot of its time browsing the web.

Android’s expansive ecosystem of third party developers is a strength, but it can also lead to confusion: with so many alternative browsers available, which one is the best? Do you really need to switch away from the default browser at all?

IT Pro aims to answer the question definitively. To do this we’ve taken the most popular Android web browsers – Chrome, Dolphin, Firefox, Maxthon, Opera Mobile, and Skyfire – pitted them head-to-head and against the stock Android web browser to see which you should be using to get the most out of your smartphone or tablet.

STOCK BROWSER

The default browser created by Google has been shipping as the standard browser on all Android devices running Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 and below. It is based on the open-source WebKit engine, which also powers the Safari browser on desktops, laptops and Apple’s iOS-based mobile devices. It’s fast, it’s feature-rich and in the Android version comes with extras including tabbed browsing and simple support for gesture-based control.

The beauty of the stock browser is that you don’t have to do anything to get it: there’s nothing to download, and you don’t have to sacrifice storage space – often at a premium on lower-end Android smartphones – to make use of it. That said, the stock browser is often seen as slow and clunky, especially on tablet devices where the large display isn’t used to its full potential.

CHROME

It may seem strange for Google to offer two distinct browsers for Android, but Chrome is a different beast to the stock Android browser. Based on the same open-source Chromium engine as the desktop version, Chrome for Android provides a familiar environment for anyone used to the software on other devices. Better still, it synchronises with Chrome on desktops and laptops, providing access to saved tabs, passwords and browsing history.

The early releases of Chrome for Android were clunky, but Google has done well to get the software up to speed and it’s a more than capable replacement for the stock browser. Some compatibility issues still exist, however, and you’ll need a device running Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ or newer to install Chrome.

DOLPHIN

One of the oldest of the third-party Android browsers, and one of the most popular, Dolphin was one of the first browsers to provide tabbed web browsing on Android-powered devices. With the stock browser now featuring tabs, Dolphin has worked hard to add new features and keep itself current.

The most recent release, Dolphin 9, includes a voice-activated ‘assistant’ mode which iOS users will find immediately familiar as a Siri-alike. Built directly into the browser, the Dolphin’s ‘Sonar’ assistant isn’t as flexible as Apple’s version but still provides an interesting way to control the browser without having to use of your hands.

FIREFOX

Developed by the Mozilla Foundation, the open-source Firefox for Android was previously known under its codename of Fennec – and it’s come a long way since the early days. Designed to offer a familiar interface to those who use Firefox on the desktop, it’s a powerful – but memory-hungry – browser going through a rapid development cycle.

 

For those who use Firefox already, installing Firefox on an Android device unlocks some handy additional features including support for the same add-on tools and access to a synchronisation system which allows you to access bookmarks and even open tabs from your desktop Firefox install on your mobile. With Chrome the only other browser to offer such impressive cross-platform functionality, Firefox is proving increasingly popular among those with devices capable of meeting its requirements for memory and power.

By Gareth Halfacree, 29 Oct 2012

¶The change is so great that the computing tools we’ve used for the past decade are no longer capable of meeting these new challenges. Instead, radically different approaches to databases, storage and other computing problems have arisen, mainly from the consumer Internet, as demonstrated by Web giants like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon, along with the start-ups in their orbits.

¶This world of Big Data presents both opportunities and threats. In addition to familiar problems like computer viruses, digital piracy and malicious attacks on servers, we can expect new problems to emerge, including manipulation and doctoring of data as well as identity falsification and impersonation. All of these will corrode the trust that has been the hallmark of the Internet.

¶Advances in software will have to address these risks. It is likely that software will become more “responsible,” able to make decisions on the fly to contain threats to the entire Web ecosystem. We can also expect smarter, content-aware network technologies to emerge to further ease these threats. Everything will increasingly happen in real time, increasing the need for robust and responsive systems for reputation management and trust. These systems will rely mainly on software algorithms, augmented by online collective human judgment.

¶The social nature of the Web will encourage a sort of instant global consensus on important issues, with little time for filtering, comparison or critical analysis. That means it will be harder to distinguish genuine public opinion from whatever the online horde happens to be saying at a given instant.

¶Indeed, every bit of data will become even more correlated with other bits of information. There will also be more data about the data — “metadata” — and analytics (what the data means) to make sense of. It will become more difficult to discern what matters to each of us individually, versus what is interesting or entertaining or trendy for the masses.

¶Indeed, the nature of the “masses” is probably an anachronism, in need of redefinition. These ever more powerful software analytic tools, trained on the massive data from the social and ubiquitous Web, is revealing who we are and what we know. This knowledge is accessible in real time to more and more people and to commercial and government organizations.

¶The leveling and commoditization of knowledge as a shared, common resource will set the stage for the creation of new, original and arbitrary knowledge. Software will play a key role as a catalyst for this next wave of intellectual value creation, one that greatly expands the pool of “everything known by everyone.” This new generation of disruptive knowledge will be built on top of the standardized knowledge platform known today as the social Web.

¶The monetization of personal data will require more sophisticated software tools, which will allow companies and individuals to trade valuable personal data in a controlled and responsible fashion. These new tools will allow us to respect the diversity of cultures, since different parts of the world will have different ideas of how this new knowledge should be put to use.

¶Today’s networks are based on hardware, and thus can be too static to support the rapidly evolving Web and its avalanche of new applications. We will see innovations to turn today’s networks into programmable infrastructure, resembling data centers.

¶Content- or context-sensitive networks will be needed, taking us far beyond today’s sometimes simplistic discussions about “net neutrality.” An example is Open Flow, a technical protocol that enables the separation of the intelligence inside a network from the network’s hardware. Open Flow is part of the Software Defined Networking initiative, in which network software plays a crucial role in making the network more programmable and responsive. What is today called the cloud will as a result evolve into interconnected clouds, or networks of clouds.

¶This interplay between computing and networking is going to increase, creating rich, unexpected and intimate fusions. Will the pattern continue?

¶There is no doubt that the massive scalability of Internet-based businesses has changed the way we think about research involving computing and networking. The urgency created by these scale effects is a result of the sheer amount of data available, which poses opportunities for research as well as monetization.

¶In the past, fewer game-changing companies existed. Their performance was often judged by what happened in their R.&D. labs, with everyone measured the same way. More importantly, all the players stayed in their own business territory. But that all changed when the world went digital. The rules that had existed for many years — “Do not come into my territory, and I will not get into yours” — simply no longer apply.

¶The changes have many implications. For one thing, important, viable research work and innovation at the core of computing and communications are being redistributed and shared with start-ups. Some of these startups come from academic projects that have been turned into companies by private investors.

¶There are many reasons to be enthusiastic about the potential of value creation in the years ahead for computing and networking. Given the challenges, we see tremendous opportunities for data scientists, computer scientists and entrepreneurs.

¶Since the Internet revolution of the late 1990s, many successful companies have been built by taking American ideas and localizing them for China. These companies may have “copied” from the United States at first, but they acted swiftly, focused on their customers and developed their products, adding more and more local innovations.

¶For example, Tencent, one of China’s three Internet juggernauts, started with an instant-messaging product named QQ, which was a replica of the same system on which Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger were based. But today, QQ has evolved to become a very different product — a combination of instant messaging, social networking, universal ID and gaming center. QQ has built the world’s largest online community (about 700 million active accounts), while its American counterparts continue to build instant messaging as loss leaders.

¶I expect this type of innovation to proliferate, for three reasons.

¶First, we are entering the age of open platforms, mobile computing, pad devices, open-source and cloud computing. These will create many opportunities for talented Chinese I.T. professionals.

¶Second, development costs are the lowest in history. On the open platforms, four or five good engineers can build an application and validate it in just a few months.

¶Finally, the Chinese market is growing very rapidly, and more innovations will come out of such large markets. We expect the country to have 500 million mobile Internet users by 2012, and perhaps twice that in five years. Great innovative mobile companies are sure to follow.

¶An ancient Western adage — necessity is the mother of invention — is appropriate here. The Year of the Dragon begins on Jan. 23, and hundreds of millions of people will want to watch the New Year’s gala on their computers. That has provided the impetus for inventing P2P, or person-to-person, technologies to handle the surge.

¶Chinese users have never had the habit of paying for software or digital content, but Chinese companies have come up with many clever micropayment strategies. For example, a Chinese e-book is free at first, but once you read half of it and get hooked, you have to pay a nominal charge per thousand words.

¶Traditional Chinese media have limited information, so sites like Sina Weibo have emerged, combining the viral propagation of Twitter and the rich media of Facebook.

¶What else might we look forward to? Chinese parents care deeply about education, yet schools in poorer cities are inadequate. Can China invent effective distance-learning solutions? There are more than 160 cities in China with more than a million people. These urban environments are the perfect places to develop “solomo” (social, local, mobile) applications: for example, finding a fast-food restaurant offering a discount within walking distance. Most Chinese people don’t have credit cards. Can Chinese phones leapfrog those in the United States and become our electronic wallets?

¶Which of these speculations will come true in China first? I’m not sure, but I am sure that I have missed many other “killer applications” from China. In a country full of energy, desire, talent and ideas, there is no doubt that China will become a world leader in information technology

As a society, we can and should invest more money in education. But that is only part of the solution. The high costs of high-quality education put it off limits to large parts of the population, both in the United States and abroad, and threaten the school’s place in society as a whole. We need to significantly reduce those costs while at the same time improving quality.

If these goals seem contradictory, let’s consider an example from history. In the 19th century, 60 percent of the American work force was in agriculture, and there were frequent food shortages. Today, agriculture accounts for less than 2 percent of the work force, and there are food surpluses.

The key to this transition was the use of technology—from crop rotation strategies to GPS-guided farm machinery — which greatly increased productivity. By contrast, our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.

How can we improve performance in education, while cutting costs at the same time? In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that individual tutoring had a huge advantage over standard lecture environments: The average tutored student performed better than 98 percent of the students in the standard class.

Until now, it has been hard to see how to make individualized education affordable. But I argue that technology may provide a path to this goal.

Consider the success of the Khan Academy, which began when Salman Khan tried to teach math remotely to his young cousins. He recorded short videos with explanations and placed them on the Web, augmenting them with automatically graded exercises. This simple approach was so compelling that by now, more than 700 million videos have been watched by millions of viewers.

At Stanford, we recently placed three computer science courses online, using a similar format. Remarkably, in the first four weeks, 300,000 students registered for these courses, with millions of video views and hundreds of thousands of submitted assignments.

What can we learn from these successes? First, we see that video content is engaging to students — many of whom grew up on YouTube — and easy for instructors to produce.

Second, presenting content in short, bite-size chunks, rather than monolithic hourlong lectures, is better suited to students’ attention spans, and provides the flexibility to tailor instruction to individual students. Those with less preparation can dwell longer on background material without feeling uncomfortable about how they might be perceived by classmates or the instructor.

Conversely, students with an aptitude for the topic can move ahead rapidly, avoiding boredom and disengagement. In short, everyone has access to a personalized experience that resembles individual tutoring.

Watching passively is not enough. Engagement through exercises and assessments is a critical component of learning. These exercises are designed not just to evaluate the student’s learning, but also, more important, to enhance understanding by prompting recall and placing ideas in context.

Moreover, testing allows students to move ahead when they master a concept, rather than when they have spent a stipulated amount of time staring at the teacher who is explaining it.

For many types of questions, we now have methods to automatically assess students’ work, allowing them to practice while receiving instant feedback about their performance. With some effort in technology development, our ability to check answers for many types of questions will get closer and closer to that of human graders.

Of course, these student-computer interactions can leave many gaps. Students need to be able to ask questions and discuss the material. How do we scale the human interaction to tens of thousands of students?

Our Stanford courses provide a forum in which students can vote on questions and answers, allowing the most important questions to be answered quickly — often by another student. In the future, we can adapt Web technology to support even more interactive formats, like real-time group discussions, affordably and at large scale.