Android Browsers: A tiny review

I recently bought a Prestigio PMP5080B tablet and up to now have been very happy with it, considering the price (review soon). One of the major reasons for wanting such a device was to have a "quick look-up device" when not at the PC. For this, one needs a browser that performs well enough not to be irritating.

Stock browser I think the thing that I dislike most is that this browser does not have tabs, flipping between tabs has become a necessity when doing things like product comparisons. One can use 'Windows' from the menu key, but this adds to the number of 'clicks' required. For some reason, it also seems to be rather slow in loading pages (although I have nothing to prove this). In spite of the minimalist interface, it is more than adequate as a browser.
Firefox I am a big fan of Firefox on the desktop, but this browser lasted less than five minutes on my tablet. I use the Swiftkey Tablet X keyboard because of its amazing predictive capabilities. While searching for something, I often use the predictions to build up a search phrase. What the FF input dialogs did was to remove whatever was in the input box each time I used a Swiftkey prediction. "Ahah!" you may say, "A Swiftkey problem", but none of the other browsers mentioned here had this problem...
Dolphin Mini I really liked this browser, and gave it a trial of several days. The layout appealled to me, and I loved the gestures, but what put me off it totally, was that for no reason whatsover, it would just die. It wasn't as though it would stop working with a 'force close', it would just disappear off the screen - it wouldn't even be present in the active apps (long press on Home). And to make matters worse, when restarted, whatever I'd been doing was gone. This broke my spirit when bidding in an online auction.
Opera Mini This was last browser I tried in this exercise. I don't particularly like the interface, but it was very fast and very stable and I managed to figure out how to use the necessary parts of the interface while bidding in the auction mentioned earlier. I do think the tab window will become a major irritation with lots of tabs open, but I will give it an extended chance. I will be especially interested to see how it performs when I upgrade to ICS later this week.

Update after upgrading to ICS
One of the reasons that I bought the Prestigio 5080B, was that it was one of the few tablets that had a stock release of ICS (Android 4.03). While there are still some bugs in Prestigio's implementation of ICS, it has been an interesting experience, especially as many of the apps look and perform radically differently to Gingerbread.

Stock browser For me, the stock browser was the most impressive change in what I found in ICS. It now supports tabbed browsing, and most of the tabs do show the site's favicon. However, undoubtedly what impressed me most of all was the popout ring toolbar which allows the content to use the full screen. There are a couple of niggles with the toolbar, but once I'd found out how to work around those, I haven't even thought of trying another browser.
ICS Browser + This is a variation on the stock browser, with some extra features (such as an extra ring on the popout toolbar). The extra features did look promising, but I found the it to be rather slow when compared with the stock browser. It also slowed down my tablet, even when not in use, so I have uninstalled it.
Dolphin Mini The problems of it dying for no reason seems to have disappeared in ICS, but this app has developed a different problem. When loading a page, it just stops loading when the progress bar reaches around 50%. If there's another tab open, switching to that, then back to the loading tab, sets the download going again - very irritating.
Opera Mini I still don't like the interface, so haven't used it all that much.

For now, I will stick with the stock browser. I may give Chrome a try sometime, but I can't figure out why it should be a 20MB download. All the other browsers are tiny by comparison.