Android beats Iphone at web browsing

WEB PERFORMANCE SPECIALIST Blaze has produced a report that proves Android is faster than the Iphone at web browsing.

Not only did Android win, it won by a long way by beating the Iphone 84 per cent of the time and loading pages 52 per cent faster. The test was carried out using primarily the Google Nexus S smartphone running Android 2.3 and Apple's Iphone 4 running IOS 4.3, both over a WiFi connection to avoid the differences between 3G networks.

During the test each device loaded a total of 1,000 different websites, recreating actual user experience rather than running a set benchmark test. The websites were each visited multiple times across a time period of days. The results were measured by custom apps developed by Blaze for each operating system that recorded the time taken to load a webpage. The median time was calculated across over 45,000 page loads.

The times that came out at the end of the test showed that Android's median load time was 2.144 seconds, compared to the Iphone's 3.254 seconds. The report went into specific results regarding mobile and normal websites. The two operating systems were much more closely matched for mobile specific websites with Android only faster three per cent of the time, with a median load time of 2.085 seconds versus the Iphone's 2.024 seconds. For normal websites Android won 59 per cent of the time with a median load time of 2.180 seconds compared to 3.463 seconds on the Iphone.

The handling of normal websites is particularly interesting when tablets are taken into account, with most using the same operating systems as their mobile counterparts. On a tablet web users will expect to be viewing full webpages rather than mobile tailored websites.

One other worthy finding that came out of the study was the speed comparison between OS versions, in particular looking at development of Javascript engines on both systems. When tested on benchmarks the results showed a doubling of performance, but when tested on real pageload times the results showed no noticeable difference between IOS 4.2 and 4.3 and only a slight improvement between Android 2.2 and 2.3. µ