Mobile Browser: Android vs. iOS vs. WP7

We got the chance to put three mobile browsers from three different phone OSes this afternoon. TJ suggested we compare how fast the browsers are.

In the left corner, we have Safari Mobile running on the iPhone 4 and IE Mobile running on the HTC 7 Trophy on the far right. In the middle is the native Android Browser on the HTC Desire.

We hooked up the phones to my local WiFi so all of them are using the same connection/bandwidth. We also launched YugaTech.com from a search results page (Google, Google, Bing) so it’s easier to launch them simultaneously.

The Safari browser on the iPhone 4 went ahead with a decisive lead, followed by IE on the HTC 7 Trophy with the Browser on the HTC Desire coming in at a close 3rd.

There’s a catch though — you will notice that the Android Browser on the HTC Desire loaded that skyscraper banner ad which is a Flash file. That was not loaded in Safari and IE since they don’t support Flash (IE will support it in a later update). That gave Safari on the iPhone 4 a good lead in terms of total amount of data downloaded and rendered by the browser.

Despite that advantage, you can still clearly see which one was rendering pages way faster in the first 10 seconds of load time. Note, however, that this is not a definitive test and there could be other factors that affected our crude test.