Android web browsers speed test

Of course, look-and-feel and features aren’t everything–good old speed counts as well. To find out which browsers walk the walk on speed, we compared page-load speeds of Opera Mini, Skyfire, Dolphin HD, and Fennec, and contrasted those speeds with those of the stock Android 2.1 and 2.2 browsers. We tested all browsers on a Droid X phone, except for Fennec; the browser worked only on the HTC EVO 4G.

We chose our test Web pages for their diversity of content. ThrasherMagazine.com is extremely media-heavy, with a mix of video formats. Wikipedia is mostly text-based. PCWorld.com and NYTimes.com contain a mix of text, images, and ads. Amazon.com contains text, small images, and e-commerce elements. In all cases we tested the desktop versions of the sites, eschewing the stripped-down mobile versions.

For each browser we loaded up all five pages, measured the load times of each, and then averaged the five load times. We did this first for live pages (pulling them down from the Web, not from a cache in the browser), then for the cached (or saved) versions of the pages. Our results are contained in the chart below.