Study says Android surfs the web faster than the iPhone
A new study released Thursday claims that Android loads webpages on average 52 percent faster than iPhone, while also throwing cold water on claims that enhancements to the JavaScript engines of either platform made web surfing faster.
The study from website optimization company Blaze involved an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3 and a Nexus S running Android 2.3. Tests were performed over 45,000 times using Fortune 1000 websites, and 84 percent of the time the Nexus phone loaded the page faster. Median load time was 2.144 seconds for Android versus 3.254 seconds for the iPhone.
It is worth mentioning however that whether the webpage viewed was optimized for mobile devices made a difference. While non-mobile sites had a median load time of 2.180 seconds for Android versus 3.463 seconds for the iPhone, on mobile sites the difference was practically non-existent: 2.085 seconds for Android versus iPhone's 2.024 seconds.
Apple made much of their new JavaScript engine in iOS 4.3, and Google similarly has updated their own engine to optimize it for faster page loading. Blaze claims that it did little for load times itself. While it found that JavaScript was loading twice as fast on average, load times for websites were not improving as a result.
The firm said it believed that some sites may end up loading faster, especially those using AJAX, but traditional web surfing should not see any measurable speed boost. It also surmised that JavaScript is already optimized, and both Google and Apple gamed their own tests to give more positive results.
Blaze said that it has no direct association with either Google nor Apple. It also stressed that the large amount of data points along with a custom app that performs the tests and measures them automatically made its study more accurate. It claimed that other speed tests -- which some have shown iPhone's Safari to be faster -- were done manually, allowing for some variability in those results.
"We know there's no such thing as a perfect web page load measurement," Blaze co-founder and CTO Guy Podjarny wrote to the company's blog. "While we couldn't control all the variables, we did try to minimize them where possible."
UPDATE: Apple, as well as several others responded to this data, calling it "flawed."