Browser speed comparison

Davy · 20-07-2009 8:13pm #1

Was reading this today and thought it was worth a mention. Might make a deciding factor when choosing a handset. Good to see that things are improving from the n95 which was far from bad for browsing. The G1 could be improved a bit, 45 seconds to load the guardian website

# The Nokia N86 was the fastest device, followed closely by the N97, with the E75 and E71 further back and the N95 8GB is the slowest.

# On average, the N86 is roughly twice as fast as the E75/E71 and three times as fast as the N95 8GB.

# The most noticeable differences are on larger sized web pages. Mobile websites, such as bbc.mobi, have similar load times across all devices.

# The degree of difference between the tested devices varies greatly from site to site. The N86 loads the timesonline.com 3.5 times faster than the N95 8GB, but for digg.com is only about 2/3 as fast. Similarly the E71, E75 and N95 8GB have little to choose between them on youtube.com, but the N95 8GB is considerably slower on nytimes.com.

# In general the Nokia devices with version 7.1 of the S60 browser out-performed the iPhone 3G and T-Mobile G1. The iPhone and G1 had similar results (with the exception of guardian.co.uk), although the iPhone 3G just edges it.

# There was significant variation between different websites. All the devices delivered a similar result on theregister.co.uk and digg.com, but the N86 was twice as fast on nytimes.com and timesonline.com and three times as fast as the iPhone 3G and G1 on youtube.com.

# The Nokia browser does better on smaller web pages (google.co.uk). This was also apparent when accessing the mobile version of some of the sites tested (e.g. m.youtube.com in 2.4 seconds versus 3.2 seconds). This seemed to be because the page started loading (a connection was made) quicker on the Nokia devices.

# The Nokia 5800 was generally a little quicker than the N97, despite running on inferior hardware. This is likely the result of the 5800 having more mature firmware that is better optimised to its hardware than the more recently released N97. The result underlines the importance of software over hardware.

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