Thank the higher power of your choice for the fiercely aggressive, competitive nature of the engineers working on both Apple’s Safari browser and Android’s open-source alternative. Not only have coders done a great job of supporting as much Web content as possible in their pet browsers, they’ve also challenged each other on speed. Not with incremental creeping improvements, but with huge leapfrogs over each other.
As a BlackBerry user — the keyboard is why I love it — I can only hope the phone’s long-overdue browser upgrade in the next revision of BlackBerry’s operating system will beat, rather than meet, these test scores set by Android and iPhone. Of all the applications now available for smartphones, the browser is the single most important one on which developers should focus. Email works fine, thanks, as does texting, on every phone on my desk. But all mobile browsers are still slow compared to where they could be. Maybe what we need is an X-Prize-like reward for the first browser development team to beat Android 2.2’s test scores by a factor of ten.
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