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Nexus S Beats iPhone 4 In 'Real World' Web Browsing Tests

Posted by timothy on from the yeah-but-those-are-only-real-world-results dept.

bongey writes "In a series of measured real-world web load tests, the Android-based Nexus S phone spanked the iPhone 4. The Android phone and iPhone 4 median load times were 2.144s and 3.254s respectively. The sample size was 45,000 page loads, across 1000 web sites. It also follows rumors that Apple is intentionally slowing down web apps to make their native apps more favorable."

4 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Bogus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They were using a custom app. Not the default browser. So what they are saying is that their app runs faster on the Nexus S. Not that the Nexus S is faster then the iPhone.

    1. Re:Bogus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      First, read the article written by the folks who did the test: http://www.blaze.io/uncategorized/mobile/iphone-vs-android-45000-tests-prove-whose-browser-is-faster/

      Here, they address this point. First, they compared their app's times with Safari's times, and found no noticeable difference.

      Nothing in your link supports this. Their update (http://www.blaze.io/business/embeded-browser-vs-native-browser/) basically admits that they ran a flawed test, and blames Apple for optimizing its browser.

      Second, they point out that javascript performance accounts for a small fraction of the load times (see large yellow box at the top of the page), and if Nitro was not in use, they estimate that using it would improve Safari's load times, but would not dramatically change the results.

      JavaScript is not the only difference between safari and an embedded web renderer. Safari has different caching and multithreading as well.

  2. Apple/Oranges by beanball75 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Someone pointed out already that the way they tested is with apps that use the browser engine available to apps. As the second link says in the main story (probably, I'm too lazy to RTFA, I read others already), the iOS browser engine doesn't use the Nitro javascript engine.

    I found one link that discusses it, but I'm sure there are better ones:

    http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/smart-phones/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229301178

  3. Well... no. by joh · · Score: 5, Informative

    First, Apple isn't "intentionally slowing down web apps to make their native apps more favorable." They have added a new JS interpreter (actually a just-in-time JS compiler) to Safari, but not to the "normal" web views that other apps can embed. This means only Safari is faster now, others are as fast as before.

    Second, this test is flawed since it does not use Safari. It uses a custom app which uses neither the new JS engine nor the better caching of Safari or asynchronous multithreading.