Sunspider : performance of 3rd party apps relative to stock browser Hi my aim is to get an idea of the slowdown 3rd party apps face on android, relative to the stock browser, on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks. In this post I would like to focus on Twitter since it is available on both iPhone and android.

As everyone is aware there are restrictions on iOS which means that 3rd party apps perform significantly slower on JavaScript functionality relative to Safari (the stock browser on iPhone).

I have an iPhone 4S with iOS 6.1.3. When I run the benchmark SunSpider 1.0 JavaScript Benchmark (see lower down for how I run SunSpider inside Twitter) then I get the following : 


  Safari : 1833ms +/- 1.3%
  Twitter  : 6900.1ms +/- 0.3% (Chrome browser etc also perform around this time).


Therefore I see a slowdown of 6900.1/1833 = 3.7 times. 

What sort of slowdown do people get on Android (when comparing Twitter to the stock android browser)?

Note I run sunspider inside twitter by doing a search for "sunspider
h". Then the 5th result from the top is : 


  "The H - News
  JavaScript benchmark Sunspider reaches version 1.0..."


I click the hyperlink and then in the resulting webpage scroll down to
the hyperlink in the line : "The new version of Sunspider is available
to use...". In this way I run sunspider from within Twitter.
As I mentioned in the comments the Twitter app doesn't seen to have an in-app browser so I'm using the Reddit Is Fun app instead since I know it does. I think that all in-app browsing uses a WebView so it should be the same across all apps. The WebView and Chrome both use the WebKit engine but Chrome seems to use a more up-to-date one. I tried out SunSpider on a few different devices and on the S2 with the Browser. 

Nexus 7

Running Android 4.2.2, Chrome 26.0.1410.58
Chrome: 1747ms (WebKit 537.31)
In-app: 1720ms (WebKit 534.30)


Nexus S

Running Android 4.1.2, Chrome 18.0.1025.166, 
Chrome: 3443.7ms (WebKit 535.19)
In-app: 4307.1ms (WebKit 534.30)


Samgsung Galaxy S2

Running Android 4.1.1 Resurrection Remix v3.8 ROM.
Browser: 1488.8ms (WebKit 534.30)
In-app: 1614.2ms (WebKit 534.30)


I ran the tests twice as I was suprised at the speed of the Galaxy S2 compared to the Nexus 7 but got roughly the same figures.