Ask HN: If iPad CPU is now "desktop class", why does the browser crash so much? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If iPad CPU is now "desktop class", why does the browser crash so much?

2 pointssendos6 comments

I have a new iPad Mini with Retina, and it amazes me how often the browser crashes. Also, when not crashing, it still has issues with far more websites than my laptop browser does (either in OSX or Win7)

Why is this the case?

I'm pretty sure the current iPad has a better CPU and likely more RAM than laptops had a few years ago, and yet laptop browsers were never as problematic as browsers on my iPad.

Laptop browsers work on more websites and are more stable. Why is this the case?

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This happens because most sites are still optimized for desktop use, with little or no testing on iPad. You'd be amazed how broken layout or JS on vast majority of websites are, but few mention this because modern browsers do a decent job of working around say, JS bugs. IE is especially good in this respect. So people test their site on say, IE, Firefox and Chrome, and fix bugs until it works fine there, not mentioning a lot of bugs they still left which were worked around by the browsers, then you open it on your iPad on which they didn't test -> epic fail. Which doesn't say anything bad about iPad's hardware or software really.

Does OSX Safari share the same code base as iOS Safari? If yes, why is OSX Safari better able to render websites and better able to work around JS bugs?

Assuming the causes of the crashes are not caused by faulty hardware, but by bugs in software, a faster CPU at best means it can crash faster, but doesn't really do anything for avoiding crashes.

If it's due to more SW bugs in iPads than in laptops, can this be due to iOS being relatively immature as an OS compared to OSX and Windows?

Or are there some HW restrictions in tablets that make the SW more difficult to be made stable?

> If it's due to more SW bugs in iPads than in laptops, can this be due to iOS being relatively immature as an OS compared to OSX and Windows?

I have no experience with or knowledge about iOS, so my guess is as good as yours, sorry.. but my guess is yes, either that or maybe the browsers for it do things slightly differently. At any rate, I think unless software makes assumptions about hardware/memory instead of checking first, "weak" (but otherwise not faulty) hardware should not lead to a crash.

There are also some iOS Limitations that i recently ran in developing a RESS Server that specifically hits some limits. I Think most of it is documented here: https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/documentation/App... (see section "Know iOS Resource Limits")

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