An Android phone comes with several Google apps built in. You get Maps, Photos, Gmail, and Chrome, along with a bunch of others that you rarely open. Chrome has a large user base on desktop, and this strategy expands its reach to most Android users. The browser is the default gateway to the internet and to browsing websites, and its popularity pushes you to use it instead of any other pre-built browsing app.
For most phone brands, using Chrome instead of whatever lackluster option they offer is pretty sensible. But Samsung tries to make its browser stand out and offers an actually useful alternative to Chrome. I previously snubbed my Samsung phone’s default browser and decided to give it a try, and found it better than Chrome in some respects. Let’s discuss them.
Initial impressions were great
Moving beyond the mundane browser design
If you’ve used Chrome for many years like me, it’s not hard to agree on the fact that the browser lacks appeal. It’s been carrying on the same mundane design for the better part of a decade, which makes it feel flat. The desktop part looks slightly better, but the mobile version is pure mediocrity. When I launched Samsung Browser, it felt like a breath of fresh air. The experience was similar to trying the Zen browser on my desktop, which focused on UI design as a core element.
The layout was much simpler compared to Chrome. Its toolbar is positioned at the bottom, which I find more convenient. Long-screen phones can make it harder to reach the top than the bottom. Chrome can also position the address bar at the bottom, but you have to enable the option manually, and it only appears after you open the first tab.
Samsung Browser’s toolbar adds thoughtful buttons like backward, forward, home, bookmarks, tabs, and settings buttons, while Chrome has only half of that. I find it infuriating that Chrome doesn’t include the bookmarks button on the menu bar. I have to expand the drop-down menu to access the option. Bookmarks access should be simpler because users save them for quick access.
The restricted layout doesn’t cut it anymore
Open to customization
Chrome wastes the bottom space instead of expanding the shortcut icons on the home page. Samsung Browser takes a smarter approach and can stack multiple rows of webpage shortcuts instead of adding a side-scroll option like Chrome. I love the freedom to manipulate the layout and menus without cluttering the home page with Discover content. Even after turning off the feed in Chrome, there’s a small label telling me that it’s off.
The sheer ignorance of keeping a constrained, minimally customizable toolbar also baffles me. In Chrome, I cannot add more than one toolbar shortcut, and I only have one more option to let the browser dynamically display an additional button based on usage. Samsung Browser lets you pick your favorite toolbar settings if you hate the default layout. I swapped the forward and back buttons for extensions and another settings option. It’s even possible to adjust the options that appear in the additional menu, while Chrome forces you to adjust to the default ones.
You can add backgrounds in both browsers, but Samsung’s default catalog is much more impressive. If you don’t like solid colors, you have multiple categories to choose from. It embraces customizability and avoids adding feed elements I hate in Chrome. I prefer a neat, tweakable home page, and Samsung’s native offering gives me that without jumping through hoops. Even the tab view section has multiple variants, and you can choose from the usual Grid or List layouts, or switch to Stack, which is my favorite.
Additional features that keep me invested
Chrome should take notes
I get that the whole “thoughtful design” thing might be a tough sell for loyal Chrome users. But the Samsung Browser has much more going on than UI customization. For starters, almost every popular mobile browser supports extensions, and Chrome shows little interest in this direction. It’s not easy to skip ads on Android browsers, and custom extensions like AdBlock help you evade them without a sweat. It’s an official extension for Samsung Browser, and I can browse my most-visited websites without dealing with multiple styles of static, pop-up, and video ads.
Watching YouTube content is an additional thing I do in Samsung Browser to blaze past the unskippable, dual-triple, and in-between ads in videos. Chrome will never offer an ad-blocker, at least that’s what I think, due to its income and business reliance on ads. But even if you use Chrome as a primary browser for some tasks, you can use Samsung’s default browser for just YouTube and skip buying the premium plan solely for this purpose.
The next biggest advantage of Samsung Browser is how it deals with dark mode. Chrome’s dark mode cannot tweak the appearance of certain websites, like Facebook, and it becomes distracting after a point. It’s a shock to your eyes, especially if you use a dark theme with phone-wide dark mode. Samsung Browser handles it nicely, without requiring any extension or tweak. There are also a few more surprises, like Video Assistant for more control over on-page video playback on websites. It’s a small thing, but having on-screen controls makes the experience much better.
I don’t use the AI features that much, but the browser integrates well with the Samsung phone’s AI capabilities for actions like summaries, image and text extraction, and more. The browser’s secret mode is a little different from Chrome’s incognito mode, and it hides downloads from the Gallery app, making your browsing footprint more isolated. The file remains hidden until I move it to the public folder. You can also use authentication to secure the secret mode session. Even if someone else picks up the phone and tries to access it, they won’t be able to do so without your password or biometric data.
Native apps can be better
Samsung tends to ship a lot of bloatware with the phones, but some apps, like its default browser, are better than you think. A direct feature comparison makes Chrome feel like a half-baked mobile browser. It still cannot match the cross-platform experience of Chrome, but that’s not what every user wants.
