I will admit, I HATE the default SGS2 browser. First website I pulled up (mobile ESPN) lagged on it. That is why I replaced it so quickly. It is just terrible to me. Luckily benchmarks say Google has huge improvements in the newest Gingerbread builds, let alone ICS.
Well, I wouldn't trust benchmarks much. According to benchmark alone, my Captivate should have been a lot faster than my iPhone 4, yet my browsing experience is just much more pleasant on the 4. I could zoom in and out, highlight and copy texts, and do crazy things without having to worry about being force-closed... or without stuttering and freezing. That usually puts me off whenever I'm formulating a long response somewhere and I don't want to lose all that stuffs I just wrote.
And when it came to Flash, there was no comparison, but... God forbid people put their videos in a native format that Android could understand! For instance, I couldn't watch videos from Vimeo or Engadget if Flash was turned off, but as soon as I turned it on, it would take forever to load or response.
On the iPhone 4, I simply click the video and watch it.
That's still something I dread to this day. It's not like I really need Flash to watch those video clips if the iPhone could watch it, but for some reason, a lot of websites refuse to serve non-Flash contents to Android. Gotta thank Adobe for that, I guess...
See, that is strange to me because I use a Live Wallpaper all the time just because it doesn't seem to effect the performance to me (does effect battery life). Of course I started changing things early so maybe I just never ran into those problems with the stock experience because I never really gave it a chance.
I think it depends on which Live Wallpaper you use. Some are just poorly coded.
The TISM ICS page is where I went too, on the T-Bolt. Was just as smooth as the iOS browser in the Vimeo video. Not sure what was going on the video, some background app chewing up CPU cycles maybe?
I think it's simply that the rendering thread under Android sometimes gets bogged and it kills performance where it shouldn't.
That coupled with the browser not acting right with HTML5 elements and even legacy CSS codes, and you get a hell of a lot of lag.
It's unpredictable to say the least. And when I was on my Captivate, Opera Mobile would force close or close itself down a lot due to low memory (low memory on a 512MB RAM device? To clarify, it only has 384MB available, but still...), so that was why I preferred stock browser to it. Firefox was even less stable.
