Windows Phone has fastest browser, benchmark says

9to5 Staff | Apr 14 2011 - 6:52 am PT

The above video pits browsing capabilities of Windows Phone’s Internet Explorer 9 mobile running on a “Mango” device against iOS’ Safari browser running on an iPhone 4 and Android’s WebKit-based browser running on a Samsung Nexus S. The results clearly show IE taking the lead in terms of speed. WinRumors explains that the Windows Phone browser came in first with 20 frames per second versus only two frames per second for mobile Safari, or ten times slower. Android came in second with 11 frames per second.

Naysayers are free to test their device themselves by visiting said benchmark in mobile Safari. Something’s fishy here, if you ask me. The HTML5 speed reading test comes from the Microsoft-operated ietestdrive.com site and it’s just one of many available tests. How do we know the test wasn’t specifically designed to favor Microsoft’s mobile operating system? It wouldn’t be the first time flawed testing was used to bash Apple’s browser. Read on…

On the other hand, mobile Safari could use some under-the-hood tweaks – and not just in the security department. Yes, they recently updated the Nitro engine which boosted Javascript performance up to 2.5 times. Nevertheless, I’m surprised to see Microsoft take the lead from both Apple and Google in mobile browsing speed.

For example, why isn’t Apple doing anything with GPU acceleration in mobile Safari? Mobile IE9 takes advantage of the GPU to speed up HTML5 rendering tasks and effects. Heck, the entire browser is on par with its desktop counterparts regarding the feature set and architecture.

When the final version ships as part of the “Mango” Windows Phone update later this year, it’ll also include a Silverlight runtime.