PB Browser TOOOO SLOW! 2.1.0.1032

Originally Posted by Bold_until_Hybrid_Comes

My browser isnt that bad. Am i the only one?? Of course speed improvement is always welcome until the day it is instant.

Your not the only one. My browser works really well and quite quick. I think it has more to do with either the ISP/WiFi strength, or the types of pages people load up (one page of very heavy graphics/flash). I tend to use heavy sites on my Laptop, and sometimes it freezes on me. I honestly think it is more of a individual user issue since the hardware and OS are all the same. Never had a crash or slow browsing here... well once I had a force close because I had at least about 30 or so sites all loaded up in the tabs.

Originally Posted by jweihrauch

I've been there. All you need to do is shutoff Flash and Javascript. Swipe down from the top of the playbook when in the browser, click on options. Then go to content - shutoff the two options. Rendering speeds will dramatically improve.

Enjoy!

Think ipads have this as standard ;-)

I find shutting off js too much of a pain, too many sites use it for things I need to do

Originally Posted by omniusovermind

I find shutting off js too much of a pain, too many sites use it for things I need to do

I concur. Just tried loading foxnews.com with JavaScript disabled. Half the page content didn't even render, including many of the linked images. Simply not an option during normal use.

Also, I question whether it's really the JavaScript engine that's at fault. When I run SunSpider 0.9 on my PB I get scores between 2000-2100, which is on par with my non-overclocked, Tegra 2-based Acer Iconia Tab A200 running Chrome.

Of course, when I overclock the Iconia to 1.504GHz I get SunSpider scores in the 1500-1600 range, which is as roughly as fast as the 4GB PB. But then the wheels fall off the OS and I end up having to reboot Android, so...sort of useless. :)

RCK

Originally Posted by blockbuy

Think ipads have this as standard ;-)

I believe you're correct. I also believe iPads have the best browsing experience out there in both speeds and performance (Yes, without Flash). :) This, of course, is only personal opinion.

Originally Posted by rkennedy01

I concur. Just tried loading foxnews.com with JavaScript disabled. Half the page content didn't even render, including many of the linked images. Simply not an option during normal use.

Also, I question whether it's really the JavaScript engine that's at fault. When I run SunSpider 0.9 on my PB I get scores between 2000-2100, which is on par with my non-overclocked, Tegra 2-based Acer Iconia Tab A200 running Chrome.

Of course, when I overclock the Iconia to 1.504GHz I get SunSpider scores in the 1500-1600 range, which is as roughly as fast as the 4GB PB. But then the wheels fall off the OS and I end up having to reboot Android, so...sort of useless. :)

RCK

I tend to agree. The actual JS engine keeps up with other tablets. I think it's more due to the implementation (ie Adobe Air)

Originally Posted by mikeo007

I tend to agree. The actual JS engine keeps up with other tablets. I think it's more due to the implementation (ie Adobe Air)

The OP's original question was about speed, not rendering content accurately. If he wants to zoom across the web, from site to site, disabling JS and Flash is the way to go. All sites that I visit (Except YouTube) work flawlessly with both of these features disabled. I can always quickly toggle them back on if I want to view comments on a page or possibly a video here and there that's not on YouTube.

Originally Posted by jweihrauch

The OP's original question was about speed, not rendering content accurately. If he wants to zoom across the web, from site to site, disabling JS and Flash is the way to go. All sites that I visit (Except YouTube) work flawlessly with both of these features disabled. I can always quickly toggle them back on if I want to view comments on a page or possibly a video here and there that's not on YouTube.

Did you quote the wrong post? My statement is directly related to speed and has noting to do with how the content is rendered.

Originally Posted by trsbbs

This is a work around and not a fix. While nice it does not solve the issue. RIM needs to speed the browser up some.
Its like working on a 400mhz machine running IE6. In fact I think that was faster.

Tim

Since Adobe is no longer supporting mobile flash, I feel it's a solution, not a work around. It's a dead horse so we might as well get used to living with out it. I feel like rim added flash simply because Apple did not and it might be used as a selling point. Future devices will most likely not support it.

Update: I never really thought the browser was slow, but shutting off just flash made a marked improvement in browser speed. Thanks for the suggestion.

If you think turning off flash made a difference then you'll love turning java script off.

I was having some problems too with the browser and checkerboarding - I switched off flash and java, rebooted. And then switched them back on and it does seem to have speeded up quite a bit.

It really depends for me on which site im on, some work fine some are so slow i almost think the browser freezed.. those Sites work fine in the android browser or even on slower devices.
I know switching off javascript will speed up things but hey, it is really needed on some pages to work correctly and i dont like switching stuff on and off just to get the currently best experience. Flash is another story, every mobile browser i know offers a option to use flash only if you activate it. the playbook is the only device to either switch it off completly or have it on all the time. Every stupid annoying and resource eating flash add comes with this option.

We also really need adblocking, but in the official browser i guess this is only possible with something like root.
I know there are alternatives but i didnt like the ones i tried and a available yet.

PS: if your browser is really bad i would suggest a security wipe, it really did a speed up for me... (not only browser) but its annoying to get everything else back the way it was (i wanted to do a clean install without a BDM backup)

I've been getting a lot more checkerboarding, too. Also, the unresponsive keyboard glitch has returned -- tap tap tap on the keyboard, nothing happens, then suddenly what you typed pours forth in a machine-gun like burst. The way I solved this before was a security wipe. That's obviously unacceptable. I have very little faith in RIM, and I've been around long enough to know that the promise of salvation through BB10 is total BS. I wouldn't be surprised to see RIM out of business or sold for parts by 2014.

Actually as someone who does development on the PB in HTML5 - the JS is engine is pretty fast - I've benched it against my 3770K using Chrome and a friend's iPad (looped over a few thousand records and compiled an array). I forget the scores but someone else mentioned its the implementation, i.e. Air. When you create an HTML5 app for the playbook you need to use the Adobe AIR SDK as well as the Web Works SDK. This is likely because RIM uses AIR internally, likely for rendering and more, I'm not 100% on this but am 99.99%. This likely means:
Its NOT Browser (Webkit) -> Native API -> OS | Its Browser (Webkit) -> AIR API -> Native API -> OS

Air is an absolute horrible piece of software. For one the vast majority of it is single threaded (with exceptions).
Its all event based which does lead to tons of memory leaks.
Its adobe, and adobe's been crap for years (this is coming from someone fluent in Actionscript 3 and AIR).
AIR doesn't handle containers well, specially nested ones, and trust me HTML <div>s are used often and excessively. Now I'm not saying that a DIV translates to an HGROUP but I would imagine there is a downside.

RIM needs to make it simple:
Browser needs to run natively and the webworks SDK should map natively.

The above is why I suspect that our browser doesn't keep up with others visually. I hope this helps understand the problem, and I hope I'm right in my analysis.

I was at my carrier store today and was playing with a Samsung tab they have there and the browser does the same, the blue loading line stalls out but the Samsung stalled for longer than my pb has. Also If I started scrolling before the page was loaded it didn't checkerboard but it did a jittery flashing thing. Seems its not just the pb browser.

I am also quite annoyed, with the (most of the time) slow browser. The playbook must be much more capable than what it is showing.

Also not trying to offend anyone, but browsing is sometimes really like internet explorer 10 years ago. How is that acceptable nowadays... :(

Originally Posted by rumaan

Well my blackberry playbook browser is toooooo slow and it takes ages to load simple pages, I CAN'T overclock it.
Not sure what's wrong with the browser because on a old youtube videos its much faster, Anyone know why? Thanks

You can continually monkey with switching, java, pictures, etc off and on as needed or you can get Simple Browser Plus.
Which also has Ad Blocker function.

Just disabling JavaScript made a huge difference in speed for me. Checkerboarding completely disappeared. Figure I can turn it back on when needed.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis1156

Just disabling JavaScript made a huge difference in speed for me. Checkerboarding completely disappeared. Figure I can turn it back on when needed.

This definitely showed some improvement on my browser, although it was already performing pretty well prior to doing this.

I agree that this is should not be the solution, specially if you have 64GB PB like mine, but "security wipe" can really help...

Originally Posted by Chrysalis1156

Just disabling JavaScript made a huge difference in speed for me. Checkerboarding completely disappeared. Figure I can turn it back on when needed.

Your correct, that does help,
I have tried that, but then was having to constantly go back and forth as i changed web sites.
But i can use Simple Browser without the extra effort, hopefully bb10 browser steps it up to what many would say is the standard browser functionality.

Originally Posted by kbz1960

I was at my carrier store today and was playing with a Samsung tab they have there and the browser does the same, the blue loading line stalls out but the Samsung stalled for longer than my pb has. Also If I started scrolling before the page was loaded it didn't checkerboard but it did a jittery flashing thing. Seems its not just the pb browser.

My point, would be, i don't know anything about the maker of Simple Browser, but my guess is him or her doesn't have the resources of a RIM and if they can develop a browser that noticeably loads web pages faster as well as have an ad block function, well , it blows my mind that RIM can't do just as much, maybe RIM should hire Simple Browser's developer. Google Android, well, thats someone else's problem, I'm running with RIM.

Neither disabling js or flash helps. Simply, default pb browser sucks. It consumes too much ram, and at some predefined point OS decides to force shut down the app. Not only for browser, but also for other apps. RIM states that qnx has great multitasking support, but at cold start it consumes around half of the ram, sometimes even more. And for apps there is only less or equal to 50% which is obvious that it's not enough. If BB10 suffers from this, as some journalist say it'll be DOA

Originally Posted by jweihrauch

I've been there. All you need to do is shutoff Flash and Javascript. Swipe down from the top of the playbook when in the browser, click on options. Then go to content - shutoff the two options. Rendering speeds will dramatically improve.

I don't want to turn off that stuff. I use my PlayBook daily and I love it, but there has been a significant slow down in the browser since the upgrade. It was great before and I hope RIM is working on an upgrade.

I'm really sick and tired to listen for some people to defend RIM by saying that QNX is working on playbook very well. Who ever saying that is lying. All of this is written in C++ which is the fastest language along with C, the problem is that there are only couple of thousand of people that really know to write a program in that language. All the rest are simply developing poor apps. To show you that I'm right. Try to open 4tabs in browser and load the page... Go to the options -> about -> hardware and you will see that you have left approx 150MB of RAM. In my case browser ate more than 350MB for four websites... Please.... Browser is just not optimised, nor appworld that has sluggish scrolling (like i's not hardware accelerated). What someone mentioned that you need to turn off javascript is just a bypass of a problems, not a solution... I need to point that playbook os has some other problems as well like touchscreen is not precise. GPS signal sometimes is not working due to poor tablet design. A gps receiver is placed in bottom right corner so when you hold tablet you are actually blocking the antenna... Sometimes when I touch tje link nothing happens, I need to touch it again... They need to look at those problem seriously and start to optimise system and develop better apps...