Speed up browsing on an Android device
Matt Egan explains how to supercharge your Android smartphone- or tablet’s web browser
To an extent the dream of a mobile web-browsing device has become something of a nightmare. Despite the proliferation of mobile-, adaptive- and responsive websites, browsing on an Android phone or tablet can be a slow, laggy and buggy affair. It doesn’t have to be. In this article, we’ll look at one useful tweak that allows you to add greater memory allocation to the Chrome browser, making it a faster web-surfing experience. And we also offer a couple of tips for getting the Android Browser to play more nicely.
Allocate more memory to Chrome browser
This works only on the Chrome browser, which you may have to access from within the ‘Google’ section of your home page.
Open a new Chrome tab and type into the URL bar:
Once you have selected the required amount of RAM, you will be invited to ‘Relaunch now’. Do so and Chrome will relaunch with the new memory allocation. You should find that pages load much more quickly. And you can, of course, reverse the process if for any reason the new memory allocation causes problems.
Disable JavaScript (and Flash)
Unlike the Chrome tweak outlined above, these changes require you to lose some functionality, but given that this functionality is Flash and JavaScript, you may not be too upset. You are in essence using an ad blocker on your mobile browser. Turning off JavaScript will significantly speed up web browsing on all Android devices, but it will also make some web pages look plain and lifeless.
To disable JavaScript on Android, open up the browser, and hit the three-dot ‘Menu’ icon in the top right-hand corner. Choose Advanced, and then scroll down to ‘Enable JavaScript’. Untick this option and you should see speed improvements, in particular on desktop websites that haven’t been optimised for mobile devices.
Flash is an option only on older Androids, but if it is on your handset you’ll probably want to disable it. To do so, go into the Android browser, select the menu icon and choose Advanced. If you can see an ‘Enable plug-ins’, it is likely your browser is utilising a Flash plug-in. So untick that option. You should see immediate speed dividends.