• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, March 17, 2011

  There's little doubt that Android has spread faster lately than Apple's iOS operating system, but a new study finds the Google platform is literally faster as well.

Android's Chrome browser is, on average, 52% faster than Apple's Safari when it comes to loading mobile Web pages -- taking 3.2 seconds compared to 2.1 seconds on the iPhone, according to new data from Blaze Software, which offers a platform for optimizing Web performance.

The study also found that Android's browser was faster on 84% of the Fortune 1000 sites tested via mobile device. The research was done mainly using the iPhone 4 and the Android-based Nexus S phone, and involved a total of 45,000 page loads, tracked primarily via Wi-Fi. The testing also involved the most recent two versions of both Android (2.2 and 2.3) and iOS (4.2 and 4.3).

Blaze CTO Guy Podjarny said the company was surprised by how much faster Android was than the iPhone. He suggested that the Android advantage could be attributed to the efficiency with which the native Chrome browser downloads page images and other data compared to Safari on the iPhone 4. More broadly, he noted that Chrome was built from the "ground up" by Google to be fast, while Apple traditionally has not necessarily focused on having the fastest browser around.

But the study also found that the latest versions of both Android and iOS weren't much faster, if at all, than the prior ones. Both new versions touted much faster processing of JavaScript, used widely in Web pages.

"Our conclusion is that JavaScript performance doesn't impact an average page load time. Apparently, JavaScript is already so optimized that it doesn't play a big role in the time it takes to load a page," stated the Blaze report. "It's likely that rich AJAX applications benefit from these improvements, but users should not expect their casual Web surfing to move faster."

In any case, don't expect a major speed gain with the latest Android or iOS software. Not surprisingly, the study also showed that mobile-optimized sites loaded faster than ones that were not adapted to mobile devices. Of the 1,000 sites tested, 175 were customized for mobile. These sites on average loaded in 2 seconds compared to 2.85 seconds for non-optimized mobile sites -- a 39% difference. The gap was even wider on the iPhone, where mobile-specific sites were 66% faster (2.1 versus 3.5 seconds).

When it came to comparing download speed on Wi-Fi compared to 3G, tests performed on the iPhone showed Wi-Fi was faster across 82% of the sites. But the time difference was surprisingly small at only a half second. Ottawa, Ontario-based Blaze used Bell Mobility to test browser speed via a 3G connection.

Separate findings earlier this year from Web research firm Gomez found Apple's mobile version of Safari was the fastest mobile browser and BlackBerry's the slowest. The iPhone fully loaded pages in 19.7 seconds, Android in 36.5 seconds, and BlackBerry, 61 seconds.

The Gomez study was based on 282 million Web pages served on 200 popular sites but included more variables. For instance, it included data from both Wi-Fi and cellular networks and from users on different networks and different types of handsets. That's especially true when it comes to Android, which unlike iOS, runs across handsets from multiple manufacturers.