I Agree. I tried the Next browser because I wanted to see what the fuss was about. This thread was dying anyway until it was hijacked for this interesting conversation. My observation is that Next is a somewhat simple implementation with what I see as some gimmicky features. I still prefer Dolphin for some uses, Opera Mobile (Classic), Firefox, and stock for others. Keep in mind that Next uses the exact same Adobe Flash plugin as Dolphin, Firefox,the stock browser, etc. Flash also works as well with Dolphin as with Next. It seems worth remembering though that Flash is no longer officially supported for Android, and as such it will be going away. (Good riddance!). Next browser comes with Flash turned on by default in Android 4.0 and lower devices, but turned off in 4.2+ devices. When enable Flash on 4.2+, Next pops up a warning that Flash will cause it to crash. Other browsers are turning it off by default, or no longer supporting it at all. That seems a bit premature, because in most cases it still wortks, but I understand why: Developers are getting tired of being bombarded by trouble reports because the Flash Player tends to cause browser crashes depending on the nature of certain Flash content.
On the browser performance discussion: I ran several tests using some complex/busy desktop pages on both Next and Dolphin. I could detect no significant differences in performance. Dolphin tended to seem faster at bringing up what I actually wanted to see. I then ran some more objective tests to eliminate seat of the pants errors. What I found when running Browsermark 2.0 is that Dolphin results were slightly faster than Next about half the time. The differences are very trivial, but Next was clearly not significantly faster. When I completed one of the tests, before closing tabs, I ran a quick PS to get the RAM usage and observed that com.jiubang.browser (Next) was consuming 120MB, while mobi.mgeek.TunnyBrowser was using 110MB ...very similar, but TunnyBrowser (Dolphin) was actually using 10MB less. The next test I ran, the numbers were reversed. What that likely means is that both browsers are likely equivalent in memory use.
A little more about memory use, to help prevent myths: Memory use of any given browser will vary from time to time depending on what each has been rendering. It depends almost entirely on what you have been browsing prior to viewing process measurements. I had Next running last night with twice the memory of Firefox by merely browsing from a second tab, so memory use should not be a reason to dump Firefox in favor of Next. Folks may find the gimmicks in Next appealing, but Firefox is a significantly more powerful and flexible browser overall, as is Dolphin.
The bottom line here is that of the more popular browsers, none are likely significantly faster than any others. Unless they have some critical fault, most use about the same amount of memory and CPU. Most are developed using the same common components. The main differences tend to be in appearance and configuration options. Some browsers like Next have fewer configuration options, while browsers such as Dolphin and Firefox have more.
It really gets down to personal preference, and whether or not you have had a good or bad experience with any given browser at one point or another. Some browsers have been groomed/tested better on certain devices, and may be unstable on others. When Chrome browser for Android came out, it was so unstable and disappointing (on the a500 anyway), and provided only the most basic of features, that I did not personally see it as worth the trouble. I tried it a few more times since and never saw enough value to convince me otherwise. That may or may not be a fair assessment of that browser today, but I still avoid it regardless. I had problems with early versions of Dolphin also, but my preference for a richer feature set and more configuration options kept drawing me back in.
Use the browser(s) that you like the best, or dislike the least. There are certainly a lot of choices.
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