Android Thoughts: Android Browser 52% Faster Than iPhone Browser Or Maybe Not...

"A Web performance company has concluded that a high-end Android smartphone, Samsung's Nexus S, is faster at Web browsing than an iPhone 4. Apple, though, says the company's methodology has a significant problem."

Many of you former Windows Mobile users may remember Blaze Software of Blaze Browser fame. Well the Blaze folks have run a very through browser speed test between the Android and iOS browsers. Turns out that Android renders most pages about 52% faster than iOS. Pretty crazy, huh? Well maybe it is. Not long after the results of this test were published Apple fired back saying that the test was flawed. You see, the test was performed using a custom app on each device that called the embedded HTML rendering engine. When you call the embedded HTML rendering engine on Android you get the browser, on an Apple device you get something called UIWebView. Apparently, this isn't exactly the same thing as Mobile Safari and doesn't share its "web performance optimizations".

This may invalidate the browser speed test but it brings up some rather interesting questions. Why is UIWebView so much slower than Mobile Safari? Perhaps because third party iOS applications can only use this UIWebView and not the Mobile Safari engine? Apps like Skyfire or any other third party browser are now by default going to be much slower than the native Safari app. Seems fair doesn't it?