“Sick of waiting for pages to load on your mobile device? Get an iPad or iPhone. That’s the upshot of a mobile browser speed study done by a company called Compuware Gomez,” Nick Mediati reports for PC World. “They found that Apple’s mobile version of Safari was fastest and BlackBerry’s browser the slowest.”
“According to Gomez, the iPad fully loads pages in 8.4 seconds on average,” Mediati reports. “The iPhone comes in second at 19.7 seconds, followed by Android at 36.5 seconds, and Blackberry at 61 seconds.”
Mediati reports, “Compuware Gomez also analyzed perceived page loading times–that is, how long it took each browser to load the items visible “above the fold” on screen (i.e. the elements visible to you when you first visit the page without scrolling down). Perceived load times are shorter because … In this, the iPad again came out on top, with a perceived load time of roughly 6.6 seconds. The iPhone clocked in at about 15.7 seconds, followed by Android at 28.2 second, and BlackBerry at around 43.8 seconds.”
Read more in the full article, including a complete chart of Compuware Gomez’s browser data with data for desktops and notebooks, here.
Those are some massive differences. And to think that I get impatient with my iOS!
Google can’t even copy the one part of Apple’s iOS that they have LEGAL access to (Webkit). No wonder Android is so far behind…
B…b…b…but Android is “open” and “better” than iOS.
That’s what Eric T Mole told me.
… this is not about “browsers” so much as about Mobile browsers. I guess that’s fair, by the end of this year there will be about as many familiar with that (iOS) Mobile Browser as with the OS X version of Safari.
And, it’s nice to see that we are not talking about “measurably faster”, here, these times are noticeably faster.
Yes, this article focuses on mobile browsers. It also points out the difficulty in evaluating browser results.
But check out the numbers for Safari v4 and v5. Nothing can touch it.
No recall the troll vomit of late that ‘My Safari browser is soooo slow!” and “Google Chrome rips dude! I kills Safari!”
Such is TrollTardiness.
Besides superior architecture, any wonder that the exclusion of Flash might have anything to do with the disparities?
Does BlackBerry have flash or Andriod for that matter, at least one that works?
Most Android machines have Flash. Blackberry just sucks.
So Android users have to wait a half minute for web browsers to load while the Blackberry user has to tap his feet & fiddle his fingers like a demented fool for a full minute before looking at anything on his browser. The other problem with demented Blackberry users which should drive them into a mental institution is how pathetically small the screen is.
I had someone show me some information that was laid out in a data grid on his Blackberry once and I couldn’t read a thing. He said that it was 564 or whatever the number was but I had eye strain even trying to look at it.
I think BB users like to delude themselves that the functionality of BBM overrides everything else but that’s just cheap ass thinking. Just get a data plan that lets you send SMS if all you want to do is BBM all day. Dicks.
Of course it will. Native code is faster than java virtual machine. Java with any other name is still java. Ellison will be collecting.
Java remains one of the biggest disappointments in coding history. It has its uses. But the first thing on the fire after my furnace blows out will be my Java coding books.
Oops.. that story was supposed to run on April 1st.
I have a blackberry, the browser is so slow it is unusable.
In real world tasks, the iPhone blows away Blackberry and Android even more than browser tests show. When I’m out with friends and we need to get info on something they always lose the race.
In performing any tasks, such as looking up a restaurant address, finding a movie time, forwarding a contact phone #, retrieving info from an email via search, etc.
triple Combo tasks, such as look up an address and forward the address to a friend while talking to them on the phone happens very quickly and easily on the iPhone – but this is impossible on the other phones. And this situation seems to be very common when making plans.
And that’s when my friends on BB and Android bring up that a friend of a friend of a friend hates their iPhone because it dropped a call in Saskatchewan. my iphone has never dropped a call.
…” my iphone has never dropped a call.”
That’s likely because you are in Canada. In US, the AT&T story is a bit different.
Mobile Safari is the world’s fastest? Maybe so, but the desktop version of Safari has been getting slower and slower with virtually every update. I have so far resisted the temptation to switch to Firefox—which is overly complex like most software with a non-Mac pedigree; but speed is definitely not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Safari.
Errrr… no it has not oO.
Do you have a MacBook with a slow-ass Intel GPU? Making it load the Top Sites page is enough to slow those computers down a lot.
Or maybe you are talking about the Windows version? It sucks, but it is still better than IE, and I won’t use Firefox or Chrome since one is too poor to adopt a standard, and the other is too evil.
Windows? What’s Windows? My main computer is a 2.16GHz C2D iMac. Not the fastest machine in the world, to be sure; but earlier versions of Safari were alot more responsive than later ones.
The only reason Safari is faster is because it’s not loading any flash on the site. And even with the flash, I don’t think these times are accurate.
Have you Seen The playbook???
It’s the fastest browser between crashes.
I think that Safari is the best all around browser, period.
I have never have had Safari crash on any of my machines.
It’s the Dorktards that install every extention they can get their sweaty hands on and then whine…. Waaaahhhh Safari is slow…. cashes all the time.
Traveling snappiness.
@Ubermac: ‘Tis true. I only started getting Safari crashes and slow downs once I started installing Safari extensions. There are some incredibly crap extensions out there that have no business being on a Mac. As usual, as you hack and graft stuff on to software, the less stable and more bogged down it becomes.
TEST: Turn all your Safari extensions OFF in the preferences, reboot Safari and compare. I’m willing to bet the problems are gone. I’ve written Apple about the extensions mess many-is-the-time. The ones that work well are brilliant and I love them. (Ghostery, anything by Canisbos Computing…).
Also note that there are some flaky-as-hell add-ons for Safari that are installed separately. Examples: Safari Cookies has had a spotty history with some occasional terribly buggy updates. GlimmerBlocker is total garbage. Use the alternative (that which shall not be named lest I be censored yet again).
😉
They neglected to mention mobile Safari also passes the Acid3 test with flying colors, unlike many other similar apps, beating even some desktop versions.
One hopes that they may increase the speed of the desktop version sometime which is still spinning uselessly while I get bored with waiting, open Firefox and get MDN in my browser at long last. Actually to be fair it is certain times that safari will do this for no apparent reason the rest of time is is pretty snappy.
Apple doesn’t make it easy to use other browsers (yet), but I’ve been pretty happy with iCab when I copy and paste something into it. I notice that wasn’t on the list of tested browsers.
you studied a wrong book man, you are going to fail.
I have iphone 3gs, android nexus one, blackberry storm.
the browsing speed comparisons are Blackberry 75%, Iphone 100%, and the Android is 150%.
Android phones are 50% better than iphone , only when it comes to browsing speed(with flash support and a little bit lack of smoothness sometimes).
if you don’t believe me , there are lakh of videos in youtube to prove this.
How to download the apple browser in my nokia 5233 phones ?..what is the website ?