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Apple Disputes Browser Speed Findings, Says Mobile Safari's the True Contender

Posted by timothy on from the you-say-one's-better-I-say-one's-worse dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has hit back over claims that the browser shipped with its iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad devices is significantly slower than Android's equivalent, calling the independent testing 'flawed.' 'They didn't actually test the Safari browser on the iPhone,' Apple's Kerris argues. 'Instead they only tested their own proprietary app, which uses an embedded Web viewer that doesn't actually take advantage of Safari's Web performance optimisations.' This, claims testing firm Blaze.io, is news to the world. 'Embedded browsers are expected to behave, for the most part, the same as the regular browser,' the company stated, defending its methodology. 'However, Apple is now stating that their embedded browser, called UIWebView, does not share the same optimisations MobileSafari does.'"

4 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Safari is fast, it's UIWebView has no Nitro. by Marble68 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Apple is accelerating JavaScript in Safari, but not UIWebView.
    In fact, I think there's a bug they're working on that apps on the home screen that use UIWebView are REALLY slow.

    Check out this blog post: http://inzi.com/2011/03/will-phonegap-apps-seemingly-suck-because-of-uiwebview-in-ios-4-3/

    The Safari browser has Nitro JavaScript acceleration while UIWebView doesn't.

    I also read that some think Apple doesn't like the web based apps cause it can bite into their app store revenue. I don't know if that's true or not.

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    /me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
  2. Re:Not Reasons Unknown! by MoonBuggy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Presumably Apple is happy that, being the people who wrote the entire OS in the first place, they can implement this behaviour securely in Safari. They don't have the same faith in giving that ability to any random app developer, who could end up creating a difficult to spot vulnerability via the API either by malice or ignorance.

  3. Re:Real reason by bongey · · Score: 3, Interesting

    4.3 has address space randomization , which is why the pwn2own exploit doesn't work any more.

  4. Re:What do people want by bigNuns · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you look at the actual numbers, you will see that the AppStore is a break-even affair for Apple.

    How does one go about doing this? Everything I have read has been speculation. As far as I can tell, no numbers have actually been released.

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    .................... ...mmm farm fresh...