Samsung is a little late to the party, but the company has finally launched a desktop version of its Android browser. Windows 10 and Windows 11 users can download Samsung Internet from the Microsoft Store, and it's available for any desktop or laptop PC, not just Samsung's Galaxy Books.
Samsung Internet has long been one of the best browsers for Samsung and other Android smartphones and tablets, but it hasn't been available on PCs, making syncing browsing data impossible. That's a feature I can't live without, so I have stuck with Chrome over the years thanks to its availability on pretty much every platform and operating system.
But that can change now that Samsung Internet is available for Windows. The initial version doesn't support syncing of data such as saved passwords, probably because that's not supported on the Android app either, and it's also impossible to install extensions/add-ons to it even though it should support extensions that work on Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, but Samsung will likely address some of the limitations with a few updates.
However, the thing that Samsung needs to address before anything else is performance. The Windows version of Samsung Internet seems to be running at a low refresh rate, which makes scrolling through a website noticeably laggy, as you can see in the video below. I have a 165Hz monitor, but the app's refresh rate seems to be lower than 60Hz, so it feels slow whether I set my monitor to 60Hz or 165Hz.
What makes this especially disappointing is the fact that on mobile, Samsung Internet is extremely fast. From the very early days of Android, Samsung Internet was unique for using hardware acceleration to boost performance. Hardware acceleration offloads certain tasks, such as 2D/3D graphics and UI animations, to the device's GPU, and Samsung was using it for its browser before it was popular or even pushed by Google as the default rendering method for third-party apps.
Samsung Internet continues to have excellent performance on smartphones and tablets, but the Windows version is nowhere close. I understand this is just the first version of the app (you see Korean text on the splash screen when you fire up the app for the first time, whether or not you are actually in Korea), but I'm not sure that is an excuse for laggy scrolling in any app on a desktop OS in this day and age.
Here's hoping the company intends to update and improve Samsung Internet for Windows regularly. Performance needs improvement, and a few more features are also needed before it can become a proper alternative to other desktop browsers.
