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Controversial study finds Android browser faster than iPhone's Safari
by Yasser Ali - March 18, 2011 - comments
Blaze tested the browsers of Android and iPhone to see which one is faster
A new study has found that the browser found in Android devices is much faster than the one in iPhone devices. The findings of the study have led to a frenzy of controversy, with many experts terming the study as flawed.
According to several reports, Blaze Software did an extensive study on the performance of mobile browsers, loading 1,000 different Web sites in the Android and iPhone browsers and taking 45,000 measurements. Blaze says that the results of the study clearly prove that the Android browser is 53 percent faster than the Safari browser found in the iPhone.
Results surprise testers
Guy Podjarny, Blaze CTO and co-founder, said in a statement. " We were very surprised by the results . We assumed that it would be a closer race and that the latest JavaScript speed improvements would have a more material impact on the performance. The fact that Android beat iPhone by such a large margin was not expected."
The findings of the study have led to a frenzy of controversy, with many experts saying the study was flawed
Blaze created its own custom application, one each for the Android and iPhone, to measure the load times of web pages on the mobile devices. These custom applications were made to run on actual smartphones, in which they loaded a page and automatically measured the loading time.
Results highly controversial
The experts point out that the findings of the study are not indicative of real world usage because what the study tested was the rendering engines and not the actual Web browsers.
Gartner's Michael Gartenberg reported on Twitter, “For one thing, Mobile Safari was not used, so the new JavaScript engine wasn't being measured. Safari is how users browse the Web. More importantly, things like 52% faster are misleading when dealing with times of a second or less. In real world that's margin of error."
Some tech-savvy users of both the smartphones reported that they did not see any significant differences in load times between Android’s browser and the Safari browser. There were some pages where one was just slightly faster than the other and vice-versa.
Gartenberg went on to say that the actual browsing speed is affected by a number of external factors like connection speed, page load, the number of ads on the pages, strength of the signal and other such factors. He added that the differences in load speeds are too negligible to be taken notice of.