We all love Safari for iOS, but that doesn’t mean we can’t check out the competition from time to time. There are a fair number of options available in the App Store--many for free and most for less than a buck--all promising performance to rival Apple’s bundled browser.
We’ve tested them all (well, a few of them, anyway) and have whittled down our list to the top three Safari competitors. Our testing was somewhat scientific: Using an iPhone 4 running OS 5.01, we ran each browser through BrowserMark (JavaScript and HTML rendering) and DSLReport’s Speed Test (latency) for benchmarking purposes, and then timed each while loading the content-intensive New York Times desktop site and playing an HTML5 demo video on sublimevideo.net using both 3G and Wi-Fi connections. Whew!
BrowserMark
WiFi: 53013
3G: 51645
Speed Test
WiFi: 15304 kbps
3G: 1108 kbps
HTML 5 video playback (1:26 length)
WiFi: 1:30
3G: 1:30
Web page load (NewYorkTimes.com)
WiFi: 12 seconds
3G: :32 seconds
Not much to say here. Safari is perfectly optimized for iOS (hence the high BrowserMark and Speed Test scores) but performed as well as expected in our real-world testing. Very good, not great, and certainly not noticeably bad (that is, if we weren’t immediately running other performance tests for comparison).
BrowserMark
WiFi: 34715
3G: 25564
Speed Test
WiFi: 15418 kbps
3G: 1123 kbps
HTML 5 video playback (1:26 length)
WiFi: 1:32.5
3G: 1:30
Web page load (NewYorkTimes.com)
WiFi: 10.5 seconds
3G: :30 seconds
Dolphin has nice feature set and decent performance, but it fell a little short in our tests. It was mostly outperformed by Safari but still easily beat out Opera, the most disappointing of our tested browsers. (Opera repeatedly hung up using BrowserMark and stubbornly defaulted to the New York Times mobile site.) Dolphin is worth a look, but if your No. 1 priority for switching is speed, there are better options.
BrowserMark
WiFi: 33324
3G: 33160
Speed Test
WiFi: 15526 kbps
3G: 1118 kbps
HTML 5 video playback (1:26 length)
WiFi: 1:29
3G: 1:29
Web page load (NewYorkTimes.com)
WiFi: 7 seconds
3G: :21 seconds
Atomic felt significantly faster than Safari in just about every test, which just goes to show how advanced we are in smartphone technology: every second matters. Atomic doesn’t win any awards in the looks department (its black theme is a bit off-putting and the address bar abuts the very top of the screen, causing issues Notification Center pull-down tab) but it offers a decent speed boost over Safari. We’re not sure if we could get ever used to the lower-left progress bar, though.
BrowserMark
WiFi: 35096
3G: 31032
Speed Test
WiFi: 16198 kbps
3G: 1105 kbps
HTML 5 video playback (1:26 length)
WiFi: 1:30
3G: 1:29
Web page load (NewYorkTimes.com)
WiFi: 8 seconds
3G: :20 seconds
Mercury might be the perfect Safari replacement. Speedy and slick, it handled everything we threw at it (and looked good doing it) and even bested its peers during Apple’s iPad announcement--you know, when half the world was jamming the sites lucky enough to provide live coverage. MacLife’s Cover It Life feed flowed well (even through reports of lagginess) and Mercury stayed connected to The Verge’s live blog for the whole event; all the other browsers failed at one time or another.
Michael Simon
March 15, 2012 at 1:46pm
I actually did test Opera, but it didn't rise to the top 3. Also, BrowserMark wouldn't run and it kept defaulting to the New York Times' mobile site. But in the testing I did, these browsers were faster.
J Keirn-Swanson
March 14, 2012 at 1:49pm
Somewhere in the settings there is the ability to turn off that lower left status bar, which is indeed annoying and too easy to tap in my opinion.
