Ottawa: Apple’s iPhone worked slower loading websites 84 per cent of the time in a test than phones using Google’s Android operating system, according to a Canadian software company.
The iPhone 4 was pitted against Google’s Nexus S smartphone over the same WiFi connection, so any differences in mobile-carrier speeds didn’t affect the outcome, Ottawa-based Blaze Software said in releasing the research.
The Android phone operated 52 per cent faster on average after more than 45,000 page loads from 1,000 websites, Blaze said.
Users don’t always notice the speed gap because websites are sometimes tailored to mobile phones, Blaze said.
The difference will become more obvious as users demand richer experiences and move to tablet computers with larger screens, said Guy Podjarny, chief technology officer of Blaze, whose business is helping companies increase website download times.
“It’s not that Apple doesn’t care about speed, but Google is fanatical about it,” Podjarny said in an interview.
Apple fell $15.42, or 4.5 per cent, to close at $330.01 in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading, and has risen 47 per cent in 12 months.
Two-to-one
Google declined $12.46, or 2.2 per cent, to close at $557.10, and has retreated 1.4 per cent in 12 months.
Android became the world’s best-selling smartphone operating system in the fourth quarter, outselling the iPhone two-to-one, according to Canalys, a research company based in the UK.
Web pages took an average of 2.14 seconds to load on Android compared with 3.25 seconds on iPhone, Blaze said.
When loading lighter websites — those that are optimal for mobile phones because the pages have fewer features, such as pictures, to be downloaded — the difference between the two systems was less noticeable, according to the report.
That’s probably because there were fewer page elements, making a download more efficient, Podjarny said.
Google’s browser is probably faster because of the way it organises the download, Podjarny said.
Google’s software finds more efficient ways of getting different elements of a page, such as pictures or text, he said.
The difference in download speeds may be the result of corporate philosophies, Podjarny said.
Design for speed
Google, based in Mountain View, California, has a team devoted to making its browser and websites faster, employing tools such as downloading things in parallel and accessing page elements before they are needed, Podjarny said.
The company’s platform is also newer, allowing Google to design for speed from the beginning, he said.
Apple has concentrated its resources on design, while “retrofitting” speed into a product line developed before download times were a priority, he said. The first iPhones appeared in 2007.
“The appreciation of speed has grown in the last year or two,” Podjarny said.
“Before, people weren’t really expecting a fast browser on a mobile device. Google has the advantage of coming in a little later and seeing what matters.”
Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Cupertino, California- based Apple, didn’t immediately respond to a telephone call or an e-mail seeking comment on the Blaze study.
A Google spokeswoman, Gina Weakley, declined to comment.
Apple more than doubled the reach of its latest smartphone, the iPhone 4, in the US this year, offering the device to customers using Verizon Wireless, the largest mobile carrier.
Blaze said it ran more than its tests, primarily on the iPhone 4 and Google Nexus S, on websites of the Fortune 1000 companies.
The pages were loaded multiple times on different days, according to the report.
The results may have flaws, according to Blaze.
“We know there’s no such thing as a perfect web page load measurement,” the report authors wrote.
The number of variables involved in loading a single page “is astonishing,” according to the report.
From gulfnews.com
