Much attention in the battle between Android and iPhone goes to the availability of apps on each platform. But one of the most important feature of a smartphone might not be the availability and performance of native apps but the performance of the mobile Web browser.
According to a study released today by the Web optimization company Blaze, this is a big win in the Android column. The company analyzed 45,000 page load speeds to find that Android’s browser is 52% faster the iPhones. Furthermore, Android’s Chrome browser beat iPhone’s Safari browser by loading 84% of websites faster.
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Browser speeds have been touted by Apple and Google as strengths of their respective mobile operating systems. But Blaze found that some of the JavaScript benchmarks that are referred to in order to brag about better performance really don’t reflect actual user browsing experience. The Blaze study measured how quickly “real” websites loaded, looking at Fortune 1,000 companies’ websites, loading them multiple times over different days and testing using mostly Wi-Fi.
According to the findings, Android 2.3 had a median load time of 2.144 seconds while iPhone 4.3 had a median load time of 3.254 seconds.
Interestingly, when loading mobile websites, Android was only 3% faster, with a median load time of 2.085 seconds versus iPhone’s 2.024. But on websites that aren’t optimized for mobile, Android is 59% faster. Blaze contends that, “Android’s dominance in handling non-mobile sites is especially important when considering tablets. Tablets use the same OS and similar hardware phones do. However, users expect the full experience on tablets, not the simplified mobile sites. This means Android’s edge will make an even greater impact.”
Blaze said that it was surprised by the results of its study: “We assumed that similar hardware specs and the same WebKit foundation would make iPhone and Android’s browsers perform equally. We assumed that a faster JavaScript engine equals a faster browser. We assumed that 3G would be way slower than WiFi, even under good conditions.”
You can read the full report here.
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