[charlesr]

I find the lagginess of the stock browser infuriating on my Nexus S. On graphics-heavy pages it can become almost unusable. Pages with mainly text are generally fine. But here's the thing, Opera Mobile on the same phone and on the same laggy pages is smooth as silk. It has remained snappy and responsive no matter how hard I've tried to make it choke.

Kudos to Opera. I would like to ask: has anyone else observed this? If not, could you give it a whirl and see how it compares?

Only downside is that it takes a while to load and seems to lose its state when switching away. Still, it's a much better experience than the stock WebKit browser.

So the question on my mind is, how does Opera do it? Is the WebKit browser simply failing to use GPU acceleration? Why? Clearly Android as a platform can do responsive, non-laggy UX because it's right there in Opera. And yet the WebKit browser lets us, and the many apps that exploit it, down.

Is it purely that GPU support hasn't been baked in yet because of lack of handset support? Or is it something more fundamentally problematic in Android?

One final tangential observation: OS X suffered from similar poor performance when it was first released. I clearly remember the tech press scoffing and ridiculing it in comparison to Windows XP and OS9. But it matured, helped by ever improving hardware, and grew into a great OS known for its style and snap. Is Google treading a similar path?