Safari in iOS 4.3 Really is 2X Faster! (Benchmarks)

Today Apple released the iOS 4.3 update for the iPhone which includes several significant features and improvements such as the option to create a Personal Hotspot and enhancements to AirPlay. One of the other improvements includes an updated Safari mobile browsing experience, which running on the new Nitro JavaScript engine, it is supposed to load sites up-to 2X as quickly as before. We decided to put this claim to the test.

We tested Safari on an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.2.1 and then updated the device to 4.3. We discovered that Safari does indeed load up sites 2X as fast after the update to 4.3 – at least while surfing on 3G. As a matter off fact, some sites loaded up even more than 3X as fast as they did on 4.2.1! But oddly enough, when it came to loading websites via Wi-Fi on 4.3, we didn’t see any real improvements. However it could be that the speeds on our Wi-Fi network were fluctuating, and thus we couldn’t test accurately. But either way, Safari is definitely loading web sites much faster on 4.3 while connected to 3G, making it a very worthwhile and welcome upgrade for users.