Rendering and Computational Performance
Smartphones are far from super computer capabilities, and web browsing can be quite taxing on the hardware, especially with highly complex and dynamic web pages. Because smartphones are much more limiting in screen space, functionality, and even network speeds, you can’t exactly flip through pages like would might on a desktop machine. It’s extremely important that a browser is able to download and render a page quickly.
In the Page Loading tests, we time how long it took each browser to completely load a web page. We did this on both a Wi-Fi network (averaging 25.6Mbps), and mobile data network (averaging 4.15Mbps). Too ensure fairness, we tested over a wide variety of pages, ranging in complexity. We timed each page many, many times.
JavaScript performance is a normalized result of a combination of several JavaScript benchmarks.
| Speed and Performance | Page Load Time (Wi-Fi) | Page Load Time (Mobile) | JavaScript Performance (Normalized) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default | 14.48 | 24.13 | 44.7 |
| Dolphin HD | 8.69 | 14.57 | 44.1 |
| Opera Mobile | 10.35 | 18.24 | 90.5 |
| Firefox | 15.6 | 18.86 | 100 |
| Dolphin Mini | 16.24 | 18.93 | 47.1 |
| Opera Mini | 6.36 | 7.16 | DNF |
| Skyfire | 8.48 | 11.51 | 38.4 |
Opera Mini performed extremely well in the speed tests, especially on the mobile data connection. Opera has clearly done a great job optimizing their servers. On the other hand, because Opera handles all of the client-side processing on its own servers, dynamic pages do not work well, causing Opera Mini to fail the JavaScript test. Still, the consistent results suggest that Opera Mini will be your fastest choice regardless of your connection speed.
Skyfire’s partial of off-site processing allowed it to post reasonably quick render times while still passing the JavaScript tests; however, its performance was among the lowest.
Firefox didn’t have the fastest rendering times, but it did score the highest in JavaScript performance, largely thanks to its new JaegerMonkey engine. This results in better viewing performance on complex web pages. Opera, too, scored well here.