I have been a Chrome loyalist on Android for ten years. I owned the Pixel, then the Samsung, then the OnePlus, and the browser was always Chrome. When I picked up the new Galaxy, I told myself I would switch to Samsung Internet for a week and report back. That was six months ago. I have not gone back to Chrome on the phone, and I am not sure I will.
The story is not that Samsung Internet is better than Chrome at everything. The story is that Samsung Internet beats Chrome on the small things that compound, and Chrome is structurally unable to fix them because doing so would hurt the search business.
The address bar is at the bottom and it stays there
Chrome can put the address bar at the bottom on mobile, but you have to enable the option manually, and only after you open the first tab. Samsung Internet puts the toolbar at the bottom by default and adds the actual buttons you use on it: back, forward, home, bookmarks, tabs, settings. Chrome has half of that and the bookmarks button is hidden inside a dropdown.
On a six and a half inch phone with one hand, the top of the screen is the place you cannot reach. Bottom address bar is not a stylistic preference. It is a posture preference. I do not want to drop the phone every time I check a URL. Samsung Internet takes the ergonomic win because it is the default, not because the chrome team has not thought of it.
Chrome cannot copy this without losing the Discover feed placement that sits above the URL bar when the address bar is on top. That is the trade the Chrome product managers keep making: discoverability of the feed over ergonomics of the URL bar. Samsung Internet does not have a feed (or it has one and you can hide it permanently). The result is a cleaner toolbar by default.
The home page is genuinely customizable
Chrome’s home page shortcuts are constrained. You get a fixed grid. You can add or remove sites but you cannot rearrange the toolbar to your liking. You cannot replace the new tab page. You can disable the Discover feed, but Chrome leaves a small “feed is off” label in its place as a reminder that the option exists.
Samsung Internet’s home page is a proper customization surface. You can stack multiple rows of shortcuts, swap forward and back buttons for extension buttons, change the additional menu contents, and pick from a real background catalog with categories instead of solid colors. The tab view has multiple layouts (Grid, List, and Stack), and the one I use is the only one Chrome does not offer.
None of this is hard engineering. None of this is even unusual. Every other mobile browser since Firefox Mobile in 2010 has had more customization than Chrome. The reason Chrome does not catch up is the same reason Samsung Internet can. Samsung Internet does not depend on a search default deal with Google for most of its revenue. Chrome does.
Ad blocking actually works
Samsung Internet has an official ad blocker extension. Chrome does not. The reason is not technical. The reason is that ad blocking in a default browser cuts into the search ads business, and the search ads business is the business.
I use the Samsung Internet ad blocker on every site I read regularly. I also use it for YouTube. YouTube in Samsung Internet with the ad blocker installed skips the unskippable pre-roll ads, the mid-roll ads, and the in-video overlay ads that YouTube Premium otherwise charges eleven dollars a month to remove. I am not paying YouTube Premium for the privilege of removing ads in a browser Google itself refuses to give me. Samsung Internet does it for free, with the explicit blessing of the browser vendor.
If you are paying for YouTube Premium only to remove ads and you have a Samsung phone, you can cancel the subscription today. The savings are real. The ad blocker is the official Samsung extension, not a sideloaded hack.
Dark mode that actually works on every site
Chrome’s dark mode cannot force dark themes on sites that ship their own. Facebook is the worst offender. Chrome in dark mode still shows Facebook in light mode. The browser cannot tell the site what theme to render. Chrome sends the system preference and the site overrides.
Samsung Internet’s dark mode forces the theme at the browser level. The site gets told what to render, and the browser does the work of inverting it. Sites that ship their own dark mode still work, because Samsung Internet checks for the site’s preference first and falls back to forced dark only when the site does not provide one.
This is a small thing in isolation. It is enormous in daily use. Late at night, I want every page to be readable without a flashlight pointed at my face. Chrome cannot guarantee that. Samsung Internet can.
What Chrome still wins on
Cross device sync is the obvious one. If you live in Chrome on a Mac and a Windows machine and you have years of bookmarks and history in Chrome’s cloud, switching the Android browser does not break that. Chrome still syncs. You just do not browse on the Android side from it.
Chrome on desktop is a different product than Chrome on mobile. The desktop browser is genuinely best in class for extensions, dev tools, and the overall developer experience. The mobile browser has been coasting on its name for half a decade.
The Google account integration (passwords, payment methods, address autofill) is also tighter in Chrome because Google controls both ends. Samsung Internet uses Samsung Pass for autofill on Samsung devices, which works fine if you live in the Samsung account world and is friction if you do not.
Trade-offs
Samsung Internet is a Chromium browser underneath, so it renders the web identically to Chrome. Compatibility surprises are rare. But:
- Some Google services behave slightly differently. Google Photos in a PWA behaves oddly. Google Drive preview has been janky on Samsung Internet for as long as I have used it. These are not blockers but they are paper cuts.
- Samsung Internet is not first to ship new web platform features. Chrome ships first because Google controls both the spec process and the browser. If you depend on bleeding edge Web APIs, Samsung Internet will lag by a few months.
- Push notifications on PWAs are less reliable than Chrome. I keep two or three PWAs as real apps and they have to be re authenticated occasionally. Chrome does not have this problem on Android.
- The Samsung Internet extension catalog is small compared to Chrome. The ad blocker is excellent. Almost everything else is either a niche utility or a wrapper around a website. If you depend on a specific Chrome extension on mobile, you will not find it.
If you live on a Samsung phone, none of these are dealbreakers. They are the cost of picking the vendor browser over the search giant browser. I pay that cost gladly because the daily use wins (bottom toolbar, ad blocker, real dark mode, customizable home page) are larger than the costs.
What I would tell past me
Four things, if I could send them back to the version of me that thought Samsung Internet was just the app Samsung shipped with the phone.
- Install the official ad blocker on day one. This is not optional. It is the single biggest functional difference between Samsung Internet and Chrome on Android. Without it the two browsers feel similar. With it Samsung Internet feels like a different class of product.
- Disable the Samsung Internet news feed. Same reason as Chrome’s Discover feed. You are here to browse, not to consume whatever the vendor wants you to see. The toggle is in settings.
- Try Stack tab view. Grid and List are fine. Stack is what makes tab management on a six and a half inch screen actually usable. It groups tabs by site so the tab switcher shows five entries instead of fifteen.
- Set up Samsung Pass autofill even if you think you will not use it. The friction the first time is higher than Chrome’s. The second time it is identical. The third time you stop thinking about it.