Why do browsers run slower on tablets?

[anotherbrian]

Looking around I find that it is just sort of accepted that browsers run slower on tablets.
Why is this?

When I use the browser on my tablet, the browser runs orders of magnitude slower than my windows and linux desktops.
This is true about the default browser and add-on browsers like mozilla firefox.

For example, the screen might fill in 10 seconds on the tablet versus say 2 seconds on my laptop where both tablet and laptot are operating through the same wifi.
Watching video seems to work well once it gets going - no jerkiness indicative of no wifi or cpu performance bound issues.
So its just getting the pipeline setup to get a video feed going and pumping it through the wifi and processors.

The tablet I have has a quad processor so I would think it is not a cpu bound issues. But then again maybe
each individual "tegra" processors is a slow processor and the work load can't be segregated over multiple processors.

What is going on? Thx!

 

[Spider]

Hi Brian, congratulations on your new Asus tablet and welcome to the forum. My guess is that the wireless radio in the tablet runs slower or possibly the tablet memory can't accept the data any faster. I'm moving your thread to the Android Tablet Q&A section for you though, to see if anyone else knows for sure. Enjoy your tablet and the forum.

 

[J515OP]

Hi Brian, there are many reasons for the slower loading. Just because you have a quad core processor does not mean it is the equivalent of a laptop or desktop processor. Even though it is quad core, it is still a mobile processor and not a full size processor. Additionally most tablets only have 512MB to 1GB of RAM with only a couple of the newest having 2GB of RAM. For the past few years full size PCs come with 4GB+ of RAM standard these days and even ones from the past several years have at least 2GB of RAM. The last thing is the browsers themselves. They are simply mobile versions of the desktop browsers and may not be as powerful to begin with. Additionally these mobile browsers might not support Flash, java or silverlight meaning that as they are loading they are encountering errors from sites looking for those things.

So there are many reasons why tablet browsers and tablets in general run slower. You have to remember they are not PCs, they are mobile devices and use mobile OS versions, less RAM and app based browsers. There has been great development in mobile chips and tablets are quickly becoming as responsive as PCs for everyday tasks but there is still a gap.

JP

 

[anotherbrian]

Thanks for the info.

I got another reason! After talking to the manufacture, they had me reset the tablet to original factory settings. This greatly speed up the system, but not to laptop speed. Either it shipped messed up or something got configured wrong.

Still have troubles with pointing to the screen - I have fat fingers. I went to a stylus which helps but still is so so. I find at times that I push a link, intermittently the tablet is slow to recognize the click, pushing a link is slow to fill, hit it again, I time out, hit back arrow, suddenly it fills, then zap I am somewhere who knows - or something like that.

When interfacing with the touch screen, android has to distinguish between inputs that deal with managing the screen (such as enlarging the window) and pushing a button on an application (such as an html link). I get the impression that sometimes there is a delay in this mechanism or perhaps android views the input as ambiguous and does nothing. Any ideas?

 

[vampirefo.]

I never really thought about why tablet browser runs slower than computer, I guess many reasons, most likely dns.