Apps vs Browser

Been doing a bit of app searching the past week or so, and I've noticed that there are a lot of apps that mimic what one can normally do on a browser, apps that link to specific sites (such as Youtube, Facebook, Pandora, and so on).

My question is this: what's better? An app that will link you directly to that site, or bookmarking that site on your browser?

I personally don't see the need for those apps, but I'm also thinking I may be missing something.

Personal opinion here, but I find the standalone apps more useful in these cases because most of the Android browsers kinda suck for doing anything beyond reading a website or two. An example being dolphin's auto-rotate crap. If I'm watching a video with the tablet in landscape mode, and I full screen the vid, when I hit the back button or the normal size video button, it returns to the video page, but turns the screen back to portrait mode, regardless of how I'm holding the tablet... happens EVERY time... youtube, crackle, streaming anime sites... It gets so frustrating it's not even worth watching vids in browser. Hence, the apps.

Same thing with apps for email, facebook, google+, craigslist, ETC. You CAN view them in your browser, but there will ALWAYS be one thing or another that just doesn't function right, whereas the standalone apps are being designed from the ground up specifically to be easy to operate on the droid interface.

Another wonderful example of a generic issue I have found with five tested android browsers is pull down menus. The menus pull down fine, BUT if there's a scroll bar inside the menu because there's too many choices for the size of the box (like picking your birth year to watch a game video rated PEGI 18), the entire web page will scroll, the menu will not. Something to do with droid and the touch interface and the two scroll bars on the screen. There may be a browser that has found a workaround, but it's not one of the five I tested. Oh, also on the browser versions of these places, you will most likely have to scroll, resize, tap, pinch, stroke, wiggle, and rotate just to read the page (I'm looking at you, IMDB). With the apps, they are made for the droid view.

Another thing to consider is you have more internal memory than Vader and I put together, so quit yer bitchin and just install some frickin apps! Good God, man! Or you could always give the tablet to one of your kids, thus freeing up your hands to carry your purse again! Droid is all about the apps! Without the apps, it's like having a car but refusing to put gas in it!

Hey now mister, I've been downloading plenty of apps... deleting a good portion of them as well. So ni! Ni, I say!

I've been doing most of my stuff just through Chrome, haven't experienced anything you've mentioned (yet). Every once in a while I'll be asked if I want to open something using "browser", "chrome" or something else (that I can't recall at the moment), but I've been sticking with Chrome.

Even if I'm doing a youtube search, it'll ask me if I want to open it in youtube or in chrome, I'll choose chrome. The one time I picked youtube, it slowed down quite noticeably. And that, mein freund, is why I asked this; everything I'd normally do on a PC I'm doing with the tablet, so I was curious about the standard every day apps we've all come to know and love. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

Maybe it's because mine's running Jelly Bean? I don't know. I figure, when I come across something that doesn't work for me, I'll try something else.