Android lag explained

With web designers keen to encourage people to embrace web apps, a regular source of frustration is the laggy nature of the browsing experience when using many Android devices. While iOS appears to prioritise the UI over other tasks, Android users often complain of stuttering scrolling as web pages load and render.

Google software engineer Dianne Hackborn provided some insight on Google+ about the issue, which was subsequently responded to by Android intern Andrew Munn. Hackborn appeared to state that different priorities of each system led to the perception of weaker performance from Android: "Originally Android went a different route for its web page rendering and made different compromises: the web page is turned in to a display list, which is continually rendered to the screen, instead of using tiles. This has the benefit that scrolling and zooming never have artifacts of tiles that haven't yet been drawn. Its downside is that as the graphics on the web page get more complicated to draw the frame rate goes down."

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