Browsers on the Kindle Fire

A few days ago I talked about Puffin Browser with the intent to discuss into more details the situation with the browsers on the Kindle Fire tablet I’m currently using.

You might remember that at the end of last year, I decided to replace Amazon’s firmware with a CyanogenMod ROM so to get something useful on it. Beside the lack of access to Google Play, one of the problems I had with Amazon’s original firmware was that the browser that it comes with is flakey to the point of uselessness.

While Amazon’s AppStore does include many of the apps I needed or wanted – including SwiftKey Tablet which is my favourite keyboard for Android – they made it impossible to install them on their own firmware. I’ve been tempted to install their AppStore on the flashed Kindle Fire and see if they would allow me to install the apps then, it would be quite a laugh.

Unfortunately, while the CM10 firmware actually allows me to make a very good use of the device, much more than I could ever have reached with the original firmware, the browsing experience still sucks big time. I’ve currently installed a number of browsers: Android’s stock browser – with its non-compliant requests – Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera and the aforementioned Puffin. There is no real winner on the lot.

The Android browser has a terrible network implementation and takes way too much time requesting and rendering pages. Google Chrome is terrible on the whole, probably because the Fire is too underpowered to run it properly, which makes it totally useless as an app. I only keep it around for testing purposes, until I get a better Android tablet.

Firefox has the best navigation support but every time I click on a field and SwiftKey has to be brought up, it takes a full minute. Whether this is a bug in SwiftKey or Firefox, I have no idea. If someone has an idea who to complain about it to, I’d love to report it and see it fixed.

Best option you get, beside Firefox, is Opera. While slightly slower than Firefox on rendering, it does not suffer from the SwiftKey bug. I’m honestly not sure at this point if the version of Opera I’m using right now renders with their own Presto engine or with WebKit which they announced they are moving to — if it’s the latter, it’s going to be a loss for me I guess, since the two surely WebKit based browsers are not behaving nicely for me here.

Now from what I said about Puffin, you’d expect it to behave properly enough. Unfortunately that is not the case. I don’t know if it’s a problem with my local bandwidth being too limited, but in general the responsiveness is worse than Opera, although not as bad as Puffin. The end result is that even the server-side rendering does not make it usable.

More reviews of software running on the Fire will follow, I suppose, unless I decide to get a newer tablet in the next weeks.