Study finds Android beating iPhone on mobile browsing

A study by Canadian firm Blaze Software into the browsing speeds of the Chrome and Safari browsers has ignited an online storm of controversy.

The company tested download times for the two browsers on 45,000 web pages picked from Fortune 100 companies. It found overall that the Chrome browser was 52 per cent faster to load, and outperformed Apple on 84 per cent of the sites visited, with median load times of 2.1 seconds and 3.3 seconds respectively.

"Android's dominance in handling non-mobile sites is especially important when considering tablets," Blaze Software blogged.

"Tablets use the same OS and similar hardware phones do. However, users expect the full experience on tablets, not the simplified mobile sites. This means Android's edge will make an even greater impact."

The study did find however that Android's speed advantage was cut to just three per cent when visiting sites designed specifically for mobile browsing. In addition both browsers' improved JavaScript engines were found to have done little to improve load speeds.

However, Apple was quick to rebut the study, pointing out that Blaze had used emulation software based on Safari and not the native application itself. Even with this flawed methodology the tests showed barely a second of difference in load times, the company said.

"Given the information that various optimisations are not included in the embedded browser, it's quite possible the iPhone page loads could be faster," Blaze reponded.

"We stand behind the statement that Android's embedded browser is faster than iPhone's. We hope Apple will help us enable those optimisations and repeat the measurement."