The Z10 Browser: setting the record straight
The Z10 has a very good browser, but there's been a lot of hype and plain old misinformation about it in the past several months. You all remember those posts stating that it is "better than most desktop browsers" and other posts that raised the Z10 to this mythically perfect browser. Now that we're a couple of months in, it's about time we check out which claims are true and which aren't.
The Z10 browser was completely written in html5. FALSE. Looking back this sounds really hard to swallow, but some people really believed it back in the Dev Alpha days. The trouble was that RIM bragged about this a lot, but in fact the rendering part of the browser was in webkit, but the UI elements around it was in html5.
The Z10 browser runs each tab in a sandbox. If a webpage dies in a tab, the rest of the tabs are unaffected. FALSE. In the screenshot below, you can see how the "Bubbles" page brought down the entire browser.
The Z10 browser is sandboxed by BB10/QNX. If the browser crashes, the rest of the phone is unaffected. FALSE. You can try this out for yourself. Open a couple of active frames, the run the Aston Martin test from the link below. Shift gears upward until the browser crashes. At that point you will see that all the active frames have also been taken down. (By the way you can see how the Aston Martin test runs to completion on the S3 in this video:
Android HTML5 demo - YouTube)
Site Map
Z10 browser has the best Flash of all mobile browsers. TRUE. The Z10 was able to run all of the Flash pages in this video I made some months back:
Android running Flash - YouTube and the Z10 felt more responsive somehow. Follow along on your Z10 and you might notice the same thing. Since Flash is officially not supported by Android anymore, the BB10 browser is indubitably the king of mobile flash.
Z10 browser has the highest HTML5 compliance of all released browsers. FALSE. This misconception was based on scores from html5test.com. Html5test doesn't actually test for html5 compliance, it only asks if the browser says it is compliant.
It is easy to check for yourself how the html5 score is misleading. The Z10 has a higher score than all desktop and mobile browsers right. Go to Microsoft's html5 testdrive site on your Z10 and on your desktop browser. Just in the first few tests, you will see the Z10 browser crash or misbehave. What if you compare it with other mobile browsers? I ran the same tests on the stock browser, Chrome, and Dolphin on the S3. The Z10 had the most crashes on the Microsoft testdrive site.
Z10 browser is the fastest mobile browser. SOMETIMES it is, and sometimes it isn't. It depends on the website. In general the Z10 is good with html5, but is poor at javascript. The Z10 also does a good job at quickly rendering a page, so pages usually show up a split second faster than on my S3, as in the video below.
z10 browser is laggy - YouTube
Z10 browser does not lag and does not have checkerboarding. FALSE. For this one, please refer to the video above. It is a side by side test with the Z10 and the S3 on a mainstream website, namely CNN. Notice that the Z10 shows a still picture where there ought to be a video. With the video playing on the S3, the two browsers are made to scroll side by side. The lagginess of the Z10 browser is very evident.