Test that showed Android browser faster than iPhone Safari was flawed

Yesterday's rather shocking finding that the Nexus S loads Web pages 52% faster than the iPhone 4 has turned out to be a sham.

Apple has lashed out at Blaze Software, the company behind the test, saying: "Their testing is flawed. They didn't actually test the Safari browser on the iPhone. 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 optimizations."

Blaze has updated its website in response to Apple's rebuttal, kind of admitting it made a mistake, but also attacking Apple for crippling iOS's embedded Web viewer.

There's another, more nefarious, story at play, though. With iOS 4.3, Apple shipped a new version of Mobile Safari, which thanks to Nitro JavaScript and asynchronous rendering should be very fast indeed. Apple didn't update the embedded Web viewer that iOS Web apps use, however. The result is that while websites are very snappy, Web apps that you launch from the home screen are sluggish.

By not updating the embedded Web viewer, developers are claiming that Apple is intentionally stymying the performance -- and thus adoption -- of Web apps on the iOS platform. It could simply be that Apple didn't get around to updating the embedded Web viewer in time for iOS 4.3's release, though.

Test that showed Android browser faster than iPhone Safari was flawed originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 07:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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