The best browsers for Android smartphones

InfoWorld compares Chrome, CM Browser, Dolphin, Firefox, InBrowser, and UC Browser on speed, features, and HTML5 support

It has now been 12 weeks since “mobilegeddon,” the day that Google’s search algorithm started judging the browsability of a website on a small mobile screen and rewarding the sites that make life easier for smartphone users. This as much as anything marks the day when the smartphone became an official Web citizen, and mobile browsers attained all of the rights and privileges as their desktop counterparts.

All hail the mobile Web! And which is the top mobile browser? Now that they have earned their place in the Web, it makes sense to push them through the wringer and see what they can do.

InBrowser for Android

There’s something phenomenally simple about InBrowser: The front page is clean; there are few buttons or extras. The minimalism pays off because InBrowser takes up the smallest amount of storage by far.

It’s hard to know exactly why it is so small, but one reason is there’s no code for tracking what you do and no local database for storing it. When you exit the app, InBrowser forgets your history and all of the other casual data it picked up about you. It offers privacy and doesn’t fill up your phone’s memory. (This has its downsides -- I found myself retyping URLs all of the time.)