That surprises me. I find the Android browser to be completely unusable, primarily due to performance but secondarily due to that annoying text reflow.
What bad performance? IME, my Nexus One browser is slightly less smooth to scroll, but faster at redraw than the browsers on my (admittedly, slightly old at this point) iOS devices. It's a toss-up, really.
Question: do you have Flash installed? I had to uninstall it completely, because even the "on demand" option for browser plugins didn't disable it reliably.
(Biggest problem I have with my iOS devices (an iPod Touch and 1st gen iPad) is that they run out of charge on standby, from lack of use...)
Did you miss the video in the article? - The one where the iPhone scrolls as smooth as butter, and the other phone scrolls slow enough to make me wonder - is it frozen?
FWIW this has been my experience with Android as well. Obviously not every web page is like this, but even if 5% of the pages out there do this - it's a serious usability problem.
I just don't understand how the scrolling performance on android is still so inferior to that on iOS, especially when comparing devices where the droid has significantly higher hardware specs
Of course I didn't miss the video; but my experience has never been like that, except maybe when I briefly had Flash installed, for a few hours a year or so ago. I addressed it in the following comment, and a different comparison video too, for bonus points!
I don't like the phone browser. It's particularly annoying to read news with, because any site with Disqus (IIRC) causes the address bar to flash every time it receives another packet. I've gotten into the habit of hitting the stop button as soon as the text displays in order to kill whatever else is running. I could just turn off javascript, but then *.google.com doesn't work nearly as well.
The browser in Honeycomb is a lot friendlier and resembles Chrome, and word is that come Wednesday, the browser in Android 4.0 will be Chrome - what this means in practice I'm not sure, but so far my upgrade experiences have been positive.
