Android beats Iphone at web browsing

I find it interesting that the study found Android to be so markedly better only for sites that weren't optimized for mobiles. On mobile-friendly sites, the median was quite close and even in iOS's favor: "The two operating systems were much more closely matched for mobile specific websites with Android only faster three per cent of the time, with a median load time of 2.085 seconds versus the Iphone's 2.024 seconds."

I don't think for a moment that the difference in load times for mobile-friendly sites (about 3%) is significant, given the errors inherent in such a test, and the results for non-optimized sites clearly show that there is a lot of merit to Android's browser stack. Rather, I bring this up because I think it reflects on Apple's design philosophy as compared with Google's. Whereas Apple designs for their ideal of what the Web should be, Google designs for the Web that actually exists. One could argue that Apple's approach is better in the long-term, but I don't think that I agree. They've taken a lot of liberties with the idea of a web standard, after all, and seem to be banking on their market power to ensure that their technical strategy works. On the other hand, Google's approach is more developer friendly, I think, in that it treats standards as tools which may or may not be employed by individual web development teams.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but all the same, I do think there's some room for very interesting analysis--- The Inquirer missed an opportunity here to delve deeper. Alas.

From the article: "Blaze has produced a report that proves Android is faster than the Iphone[sic] at web browsing."

This is incorrect. Blaze didn't even test the Android browser or Mobile Safari. It tested the performance of embedded browsers in third party apps.

From the report [0]: "The measurement itself was done using the custom apps, which use the platform’s embedded browser. This means WebView (based on Chrome) for Android, and UIWebView (based on Safari) for iPhone."

Mobile Safari is faster than embedded browsers in third party iOS apps [1].

[0] http://www.blaze.io/uncategorized/mobile/iphone-vs-android-4...

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9214752/Apple_Blaze_s...

Android/iPhone web browsing speed test flawed - http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/androidiphone-web-browsin...

A longstanding quirk of the Android browser is that it can't handle elements that use overflow: auto to create a separate scrollable area. iOS devices handle this by two finger scrolling within these elements.

There is a two year old bug report noting that you cannot browse the android developer site on an android device as a result of this.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2118

Until this is resolved I'd have a hard time accepting that android beats iPhone at web browsing.

How many times does this need to be posted? It has already been shown to be a bogus report that doesn't even test what it claims to.

They have to use in app browsers, on wifi, to non-mobile sites to get those numbers. When they compare non-mobile sites, or browsing speed over 3G, the gap is non-existant The phones are even in every other metric.

I understand they want to get traffic, and sell their website optimization, but they are taking the editorializing a little too far.