Apple is understandably a little upset with the smartphone browser speed test results that came out earlier today. Blaze Software ran an iPhone 4 through a battery of tests up against a Nexus S and found the Apple device to take around 50% longer to load pages. Apple’s fired back, attacking the way Blaze ran its tests, claiming they don’t accurately reflect the phone’s performance due to the roundabout way Blaze conducted its study.

The problem is one that’s rapidly starting to become familiar: that iOS 4.3 sees some nice fast javascript speeds in-browser, but those speeds don’t carry over to ever implementation of the web on an Apple device. Earlier this week we looked at how web apps launched from the home screen don’t employ the new Nitro engine, and run much more slowly than when accessed from within Safari proper. In this case, Blaze used Apple’s web engine from within its own app, suffering from the same performance degradations as a result.

Apple seems to think that this difference, once corrected for, will put the iPhone on top of browser speed ranking. The company pointed out that, even with this handicap, it still only lagged behind Android by a second or so. We’d be very interested to see a new round of tests, one giving us some more useful figures to reveal who’s really the fastest game in town.

Source: Ars Technica