Android's Baffling Array of Browsers

Samsung Internet#

The cream of the crop among OEM browsers. Built on the Blink engine with a unified OneUI design. Its features:

• Anti-tracking: blocks trackers, third-party cookies and more.
• Anti-nuisance: reverse redirection for back navigation, popup blocking, app-jump interception.
• Ad blocking: supports installing third-party ad-blocking extensions
• Video assistant: an excellent video playback experience
• Background playback: lets you play videos in the background without YouTube Premium
• Force dark: excellent forced dark mode for websites
• Samsung Pass: Samsung’s own autofill service, but Google autofill doesn’t work, which is why I gave up on it
• Region lock: Samsung devices in the China region can’t use Google as the search engine; you have to change regions.

Domestic OEM browsers#

Domestic OEM browsers are… hard to rate. Put diplomatically, they have “excellent localization”.

Whether it’s Xiaomi/Huawei/vivo/OPPO or any other domestic OEM, they’re basically all the same: the homepage is stuffed with news, novels, comics, short videos, livestreams and so on — extremely bloated.

The upside is that it works out of the box and matches domestic users’ habits.

The downsides are obvious: vague privacy policies, lots of ads, bloated features, and an engine that’s usually half a step behind Chromium’s builds. Some vendors even stuff blacklists and whitelists into your browser, silently filtering out certain sites so you can’t visit them, or uploading your browsing history straight to their servers.

In-app browsers#

Many apps like to wrap their own extra browser inside themselves, which brings us to Android’s Webview.

Android Webview: the in-app browser in most apps relies on it. It isn’t an app you can open directly; it’s a system component.

When you open a link inside an app, this is the WebView being invoked.

Domestic browsers#

This category has a huge market share in China — QQ Browser, for example. They’re mostly based on Chromium/WebKit but heavily modified. For instance, they deeply integrate downloads, novel mode, cloud storage and the like, which makes them better in certain scenarios, such as reading novels.

The downside is very obvious: privacy. What they offer is not a plain browser experience. On top of that, support for modern web standards sometimes lags behind Chrome and Firefox.

Google Chrome#

The culmination of the Google ecosystem. Its advantage isn’t just the excellent Google ecosystem on Android devices; it can almost be called the best browser available today — the best engine, broad compatibility and other strengths make it the browser with the highest market share. Chongxi uses Chrome mainly because of Google’s autofill service.

The downside is its higher resource usage — it’s a bit of a performance hog. The feature set on mobile really is rather sparse. On privacy, it requires a fair amount of trust in Google.

Microsoft Edge#

Edge is more or less Chrome’s sibling, also using the Chromium engine and inheriting its excellent rendering engine.

Its biggest selling point is deep sync integration with Windows PCs. If you mainly use a Windows computer, the phone-to-PC sync Edge offers is every bit as good as Chrome’s.

I think Edge gives users who don’t want to be tied down to the Google suite a top-tier option.

Its downsides are also very obvious now: it’s started to follow in the footsteps of domestic rogue software, stuffing in a pile of irrelevant things like news feeds and AI, and Microsoft’s taste really is terrible — it looks far uglier than Chrome.

Mozilla Firefox#

The mainstream browser on Android that uses its own GeckoView engine.

Its strengths stand out: powerful browser extensions, strict tracking protection, and container tabs that isolate login states for different identities such as work and personal, preventing cross-site tracking.

If you care about privacy, Firefox is absolutely the way to go.

Vivaldi Browser#

Built by the former Opera team, and it inherits a high degree of customizability.

Chongxi used it for a while and found it pretty good. It supports Google autofill and its interaction logic is very close to Chrome’s, so switching over from Chrome cost me nothing.

Brave Browser#

Brave blocks all ads and trackers by default, and it’s extremely fast.

Its controversial side, though, is that it tries to reshape how websites make money using an attention economy model. Whether or not you agree with the model, its privacy protection and speed are worth a try.

Kiwi Browser#

The first to support desktop Chrome extensions on Android. But it seems to be somewhat dead now.

DuckDuckGo#

Duck, duck, run

Like its search engine, its browser app is extremely privacy-focused: it automatically clears browsing data every day, has a one-tap burn button that wipes all records at once, and also offers app tracking protection, all in a very light and clean experience.

via#

Via is a pure browser that returns to the essence of browsing the web.

It calls Android’s built-in WebView engine directly to render pages. That means it doesn’t need to bundle a huge engine, giving it extreme control over install package size.

It’s also quite fun to tinker with — user scripts, customization and other features all work great. As a pure browser, it’s outstanding.

Tor#

This is a rather special browser. Its design goal is very pure: hide your network identity and activity as much as possible.

Your traffic no longer reaches the target website directly; instead it enters the Tor network. There, your traffic is automatically encrypted three times and relayed through at least three randomly chosen relay nodes before finally leaving via an exit node to reach the destination site. That means the target website only sees the IP address of the exit node, not your real IP.

Its main purpose is accessing hidden services with the .onion suffix — that is, the dark web. It’s very inconvenient for everyday use, because traffic has to be relayed multiple times and is slow.