Edible Apple

Apple and Android nerds were abuzz yesterday over a report by Blaze, a Canadian software company which claimed that Google’s Nexus S was able to load webpages over an average wi-fi network 52% faster than the iPhone 4. Testing encapsulated more than 45,000 page loads from 1,000 websites with the average load time on the Nexus S and iPhone 4 coming in at 2.14 and 3.25 seconds respectively.

That’s not an insignificant difference, and will only be exacerbated, according to Blaze CTO Guy Podjarny, on tablets that require richer browsing experiences.

But not surprisingly, the testing methodology of the study puts the results into question.

You see, Blaze didn’t conduct the test using the iPhone 4’s mobile Safari browser and the Nexus S’s Chrome browser. Rather, Blaze accessed the web via a proprietary application that wasn’t updated to take advantage of the updated Safari browser with Apple’s new Nitro JavaScript engine. This shouldn’t be overlooked as javascript performance and overall browsing speed using Safari on iOS 4.3 is markedly faster than Safari performance in iOS 4.2.1.

Blaze, though, isn’t backing down from their report, explaining that the updated Safari’s Nitro boost would only “slightly” change the results since “JavaScript only accounts for a small percentage of the total load time.”

The entire Blaze study can be viewed here.