They have sponsored and released the only modern smartphone OS that isn't locked down to one company like iOS. They (through Android) are to Apple, what OpenOffice/LibreOffice is to MS Office. They are the reason Apple don't own smartphone. With Google/Android what would be the Apple competitor? Blackberry? OpenMoko?!
Maybe the only popular one, but certainly not the only one. In fact, only webOS is (was, I guess) locked to a single company. Windows Phone isn't open source, but there are at least four hardware manufacturers. Nokia's MeeGo is open source (and quite good on my Nokia N9). And, soon, webOS will be too. So, while Android is a more open mobile OS, it certainly isn't the only one.
This is why I'm hoping they will finally switch to Chrome in Android 5.0 or whatever version is announced at Google I/O (Android/Chrome event). And then they update that Chrome browser every 6 weeks, too. It's not like they couldn't. They can already push all their core apps to automatically update for Android 2.2+.
According to this HTML5 compliance test, the ICS browser scores 230 (out of 450), while Chrome 15 desktop browser scores 342. Why would these browsers have such distant scores if they shared the same browser core? For comparison, the Firefox 8 desktop browser scores 314 and the Firefox 8 mobile browser scores 314.
There are a variety of options that are disabled on the mobile build to save memory and cpu. It's the same core, it just doesn't have all the bells and whistles enabled for a variety of reasons.
It's not Chrome. It's based on WebKit, like Chrome, yes. But it's not Chrome. (Easy way to check: note that the icon says "Browser", not "Chrome", and it isn't the Chrome icon.)
I disagree that both have good browsers. What I'm worried about is the lack of emphasis that seems to be placed; Android browser is missing a lot of html5 features (according to caniuse.com it only supports 66% of current features in Android 4.0).
Mozilla, on the other hand, seems to be making mobile a priority with all of the work they are doing in WebAPI. Their browser is updating a lot faster than Android's, which I believe still only updates with OS upgrades.
OS upgrades that a lot of Android users don't get. If I want to get an up to date browser on my Nexus One, I have to use Firefox... as Google said they no longer support the phone.
iOS users are in the same boat, but Apple has been providing much more support to older devices.
Weird, my 3GS seems no different on iOS 5 vs iOS 4. At worst, it's nothing like the iOS 4 performance on the iPhone 3G. This video apparently shows the 3GS being faster than iPhone 4 (believable, actually, if you consider the quadrupling of pixels on the iPhone 4 from the 3GS): http://techuncover.com/blog/tag/iphone-3gs-is-faster-on-ios-...
It's entirely possible that ios's shitty performance is due to me rescuing it from brick state via oven, but I don't really buy it. The phone works perfectly, except that it's very slow and experiences the occasional hang. It's. Ertainly nowhere near as smooth as my buddy's 4s. I don't expect it to be, but I do expect it to unlock without a 4 second lag.
