Do Android Stock Browser, Firefox Mobile and Opera Mobile use proxy server to perform rendering

Question

It is quite interesting to know that, Opera Mini is using Proxy Server to perform all the rendering work, instead of relying the phone itself to do it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality) This will help to reduce required processing work, especially in lower end phone.

Do Android Stock Browser, Firefox Mobile and Opera Mobile also employ the same technique? Current Android Phone is having powerful processing capability. Does the above technique will bring more harm than good?

Will request having to go through an additional will slow down the whole process, compared to letting the rendering work done by phone itself?

Answer 1

In Opera Mobile, you can enable Opera Turbo to use the same proxying technology as used by Opera Mini.

Android Stock Browser does not use compressing proxy at all and I believe neither does Firefox Mobile (though given that Firefox Mobile has plugins system there might be a plugin for that).

Several lesser known browsers in the Market does use similar proxying technique, but I can't recall off the top of my head which ones though.

Answer 2

The stock android brower uses WebKit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit as rendering engine.

The solution adopted by Opera assumes that network speed is there, whilst processing power is not.

These days this is not a given, the new dual core phones have power to spare (SGSII has a hardware accelerated browser!) whilst the 3G network is often congested in main urban spots.

It might improve things on lower end android devices.