Well, I don't think you should use both for the same purposes. If you want just a list of ids to push around, use the search. It will always give you back just ids in a list. If you want to do something with the fields of these records as well, you use the browse. 

The top example is very counter-intuitive as well. You already have the ids; self.browse(cr, uid, ids, context=None), so why bother going trough the objects to find that the result of the browse and for-loop is the exact same as the ids you are passing already?

So for example if you need all the partners that are customers:

partner_obj = self.pool.get('res.partner')

partner_ids = partner_obj.search(cr, uid, [('customer','=',True)])

and if you need more information of those partners, feed that list into a browse:

partners = partner_obj.browse(cr, uid, partner_ids)

for partner in partners:

    if partner.active:

         print "It is active"