Tests show Android Web apps faster than iOS 4.3's -- outside the Safari browser
Blaze Software tests also show Android provided a faster browsing experience four times out of five; but Safari browsing not tested
The latest Android smartphone loaded Web pages 52 percent faster than iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3, according to thousands of independent field tests released today by Blaze Software.
The Web page load times were about a second apart for the two devices in a study that amassed 45,000 load tests in all. For Android 2.3 on the Google Nexus S smartphone using a version of Chrome, the median load time was 2.144 seconds, compared to 3.254 seconds for iPhone 4 on iOS 4.3 running a version of Safari, according to the study.
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[Editor's note: Apple later responded that Blaze's tests were "flawed" because they did not run in the Safari browser, which is where Apple enhanced the JavaScript and HTML processing in iOS 4.3. Apple noted that Blaze ran its tests through its own app, not Safari, and so was running the unoptimized WebKit browser engine in iOS 4.3. Independent tests by other organizations have confirmed that HTML apps running outside the Safari browser are slower than those running in Safari. iOS allows native apps that run HTML apps within their sandbox, and many developers assumed that facility got the same speed enhancements as Safari. But Apple has now confirmed that is not true.]
Blaze used Fortune 1,000 websites for the tests, running the Web page loading tests repeatedly [in its own app, not in the Safari browser --Ed.] over Wi-Fi and 3G wireless connections with nothing else running on the phones at the time. The Android phone was faster than the iPhone in loading 84 percent of the tested websites. "Android wasn't just faster overall, but rather provided a faster browsing experience four times out of five," the study said.
Blaze sought to describe its tests as objective, adding it has no association with Google or Apple "in any form," David Horne, marketing programs manager for Blaze, said in an email. Blaze writes software to automatically accelerate website speeds and created a mobile testing tool used in the Android-iPhone study to be able to analyze mobile Web performance and to "discover new optimization to add to our core product," Horne explained.
While Android came out ahead in the load time comparison, the study noted that both are "generally fast." However, the study also noted that " browser speed is a big deal" and had been a prominent point when both Apple and Google recently noted their improved JavaScript engines. [Blaze uses the word "browser" repeatedly to describe its tests, but it in fact did not test browser speed but out-of-browser Web app performance, under the apparent assumption the two would be the same. --Ed.] "Browser performance is all the rage, and everybody says theirs is faster," the study added.
The study's authors said they were surprised by the results.
One surprise came because both iPhone and Android had optimized JavaScript engines in their latest versions, but were not much faster than previous versions also tested, Blaze said. "Both Apple and Google tout great performance improvements [with optimized JavaScript] but those seem to be reserved to JavaScript benchmarks and high-complexity apps," the study said. "If you expect pages to show up faster after an upgrade, you'll be sorely disappointed."
