Android 3.0 Hardware Acceleration (opens in new tab)

I had the same feeling. It's not just in the browser, it's throughout the whole experience, so the raster trick for zooming that's mentioned doesn't explain it completely.

Google really needs to sort it out. It's a shonky user experience that really doesn't need it to be. I was certain that it was hardware acceleration that was missing, but obviously not. There was that bug ticket which indicated that Google thought it was garbage-collector related, but then that was supposed to have been modified in 2.3.

It's really pretty poor, and is certainly not helping to sell devices. Put an iPad 2 next to a Xoom, or a Nexus One next to an iPhone 4, and you really do see the difference. In stores like Best Buy, that's how they're setting up displays, of the two "flagship products". And I'm sure customers are going to go with the Apple product after trying them both.

What I notice is that my iPad1 is often just as slow or slower than my Nexus One but the experience is much "smoother" - that is, when you scroll it scrolls smoothly - always. If the rest of the browser can't keep up, too bad, you get some blank areas showing, but at no time is that allowed to compromise the speed of the scrolling, zooming or whatever else you're doing. This must be reflected quite deeply in the code and even the OS I imagine to always prioritise user interactions over anything else. It definitely makes using the devices more "pleasant" even while sometimes it at the same time makes them technically slower or less functional.

Android does a lot more reflows than iOS. iOS zooms by first scaling a raster image of the page and then reflowing after a brief delay of user input. That kind of resize is very fast, whereas a full HTML document reflow is slow.

iOS does that thing were the page sits still till it realises you're scrolling, not clicking, then accelerates towards your finger then decelerates again as it approaches your finger. Android (at least as of 2.2) seems to just snap to your finger once it realises you're scrolling. Could that be it?

The browsing on an original and even 3g iphone are so enranging that they almost make me homicidal - so I think what you are seeing is a rev 1 vs a rev 4 product, so I wouldnt compare them in such degrees

From TFA:

    some operations behave differently when hardware acceleration enabled

So they've been conservative. I kind of wish they hadn't - 3.0 is a big enough version jump that people understand there's going to be a few glitches, and there are almost certainly a large number of apps that don't use any of the small number of listed APIs that change their behavior under hardware acceleration. Those apps that do use the APIs could be autodetected I would have thought and have hardware acceleration disabled automatically.

Known issue, they use some nasty combination of IFRAME and JavaScript for the site that breaks in a lot of browsers.