Android browsing already outperforming iOS

Google really do have Android sorted. Their latest Android browser has been shown to render websites faster than even the iPhone browser, up to 52 percent faster according to research and testing.

This study has been carried out by Blaze.io, which measured performance across 45,000 tests on pages from websites of Fortune 1000 listed companies using handsets on Android 2.2 and 2.3 and iOS 4.2 and 4.3.

The results were massively in favour of Android, with 84 percent of sites loading faster on the Google operating system, averaging 52 percent improvements. The iPhones took 3.2 seconds to load a page, but the Android devices such as the Google Nexus S took only 2.1 seconds.

The company said in their report “While we expected to see one of the browsers come out on top, we didn’t expect this gap. Secondly, we saw that despite the optimised JavaScript engines in the latest iPhone and Android versions, browsing speed did not get better.

“Both Apple and Google tout great performance improvements, but those seem to be reserved to JavaScript benchmarks and high-complexity apps. If you expect pages to show up faster after an upgrade, you'll be sorely disappointed,” the company concluded.

Interesting, the benefit of Android's speedy browser is lost when accessing websites that have been optimised for mobile devices. “Android's edge completely disappeared when looking at mobile specific sites[, where] Android was only 3 per cent faster.”

The performance improvements could be seen as an early indication that the Android browser will help tablet performance.

“We assumed that similar hardware specs and the same WebKit foundation would make iPhone and Android's browser perform equally,” the company concludes. “We assumed that a faster JavaScript engine equals a faster browser. All of these assumptions have been proven wrong when we actually measured those scenarios, The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark pushed browsers to optimise JavaScript performance, because they could measure it.”

KitGuru says: Android dominance in the years ahead? Google certainly seem to have their software on the right track.

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