best/fastest browser

Opera and XScope are the fastest. Opera is the smoothest, but it definitely has some annoying quirks.
 
Dolphin HD works really well & is fast. I was using standard Dolphin, until I realized you couldn't use the vast # of plug-ins available for it, so I switched to HD. They are both good browsers. Best thing is to try both and see which one suits you better. I will say the gesture button in the lower left corner of the screen and the side panels in the HD version annoyed me, so I turned both of those things off.
 
Dolphin HD works really well & is fast. I was using standard Dolphin, until I realized you couldn't use the vast # of plug-ins available for it, so I switched to HD. They are both good browsers. Best thing is to try both and see which one suits you better. I will say the gesture button in the lower left corner of the screen and the side panels in the HD version annoyed me, so I turned both of those things off.

Yep, you said it!
 
I liked this article although it is from July. I currently use Dolphin HD and am very happy with its performance, although I think it may consume a pretty good amount of battery. I tried Opera for a bit but the page rendering wasn't very good and I didn't like the controls. I used xScope as well but don't really like how much screen space it takes up. If using Dolphin you can get 100% of the screen used by the webpage instead of extraneous tabs and toolbars which I like a lot.
 
I liked this article although it is from July. I currently use Dolphin HD and am very happy with its performance, although I think it may consume a pretty good amount of battery. I tried Opera for a bit but the page rendering wasn't very good and I didn't like the controls. I used xScope as well but don't really like how much screen space it takes up. If using Dolphin you can get 100% of the screen used by the webpage instead of extraneous tabs and toolbars which I like a lot.

So regular Dolphin?
 
I'm really liking Dolphin HD so far. I like the look and functionality of the interface and that you customize the color and install add-ons. It's also nice how you can make it full screen where the notification bar dissapears.
YMMV
 
In my personal testing, xScope has been much much faster than Dolphin. I also prefer it's simple look and high functionality. It was some really interesting features that aren't obvious if you don't research (i.e. one finger "pinch to zoom", pull down function bar, etc).
 
Just realized that xscope at idle under task manager is using quite a bit of cpu power. Kinda bummed was really liking it. Any xscope users have these issues? Xscope 6 just came out today though.