Microsoft’s attemps to claim a browser speed record for their Windows Phone 7.5 have been blown out of the water after a comparison of of Nokia Windows phone and iPhone 4S running iOS 4.3 showed that the Apple offering was more than twice as fast.
A comparison from YouTube user 359gsm posted at My Nokia Blog of a Nokia Lumia 800 pitted against both an iPhone 4 using iOS 4.3 and an iPhone 4S on iOS 5 proved that the Wondows phone was significantly slower in the same way that Windows Explorer is slower than both Chrome and Firefox.
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Electronista said that While Microsoft’s showcase HTML5 Speed Reading test beat the iPhone 4, even the older, 1GHz Apple phone and OS beat the 1.4GHz Windows Phone soundly in every other test, including Browsermark, the JavaScript-focused Sunspider test, and the generic HTML5 Test.
In most cases, the newer iPhone 4S was more than twice as fast, running three times as quickly as the Lumia 800 in the Sunspider benchmark. Microsoft’s lead in the Speed Reading test was also mostly eroded by software: just upgrading the iPhone 4 to iOS 5 puts it within three frames per second of the year older Nokia phone.
Apple doesn’t have the absolute lead. Benchmarks of the Galaxy Nexus show that Google’s browser expertise mixed with Android 4.0 optimizations are slightly faster than the iPhone 4S in some areas, though not in others.
The deficit can largely be pinned on the Internet Explorer 9 engine itself. While much faster and more accurate than the IE7-based engine it replaced, it’s still outperformed by modern WebKit browsers like Chrome and Safari on the desktop, most of which translates over to mobile. Microsoft is also hobbled by slightly outdated chassis specifications that limit current models to single-core processors where Apple, Samsung, and most rivals can use two cores and win through brute force.
