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Kindle Fire, iPad, iPhone, Andriod…Who Delivers Fast Web Experience? —Yottaa Friday Web Speed Race
Posted on November 29th, 2011 by

Friday is our Website Speed Race day. At each Website Speed Race, we select one website, load it from a wide range of devices from laptops, tablets to mobile phones, all over the same WIFI connection, and compare which client delivers the best web performance. With coffee and beer in hand on a Friday, the race isn’t strictly scientific. But it is fun for those who are obsessed with web performance like us.

Last Friday, we selected The New York Times as the lucky website to be tested. The New York Times website, www.nytimes.com, has over 17.3 million unique visitors a month and received a Yottaa Score of 35. A Yottaa Score measures the user experience of web page loading, as experienced by the website visitor. This score factors in how fast the site displays the page title, the time it takes for the initial browser rendering to occur, the time it takes for core content to appear and the time it takes for the page to be fully usable (“time to interact”.) This score ranges from 0 to 100. A higher score means a better page load user experience. The New York Times is a little below average for its page load experience comparing to all other websites over the Internet. However, it is a typical content website that can represent the news industry well.

We assembled 12 devices to participate the race:

The metric that we use to compare site loading performance on these client environments is “Time to Interact”, the time it takes from when the website URL was entered into a browser to the moment the page is fully loaded. To ensure we had proper results, three different staff members used watches and averaged their times at the end of each trial. A fourth staff member recorded the results, while another documented the tests with pictures and video.

Yottaa Friday Web Speed Race Result

From the same WiFi connection and loading the same website (www.nytimes.com), there is a huge performance difference among the tested 12 devices.

The fastest ones are laptops (2 MacBooks and Lenovo X201) – all ranging from 4.4 seconds to 7.1 seconds. The slowest ones are iPhone 3 devices, taking a whopping 40 seconds. Clearly laptops still beat all other devices for performance.

Interesting discovery: if you compare only the tablets and smart phones (taking out the 3 laptops), Amazon Kindle Fire is the fastest device (7.6 seconds), followed by MacBook Air (8.9 seconds) and iPhone 4s (9.5 seconds). Way to go, the future of the web is cloud accelerated!

Posted in benchmark, industry, web performance, Yottaa | Tagged
coachwei

About coachwei

Coach Wei is CEO of Yottaa. Coding, running, magic, robot, big data, speed... are among his favorite list of things. Sadly, his coding capability has aged to PowerPoint level right now (he has failed to defy the law of nature so far despite his repeated attempts to code Ruby). Caffeine, doing something entrepreneurial and getting the latest RedSox scoop are three reasons that he gets up in the morning excited.
6 Comments
  • Xitag68

    Could you test again Windows 7 with google chrome ?

  • http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/12/01/loadtimer-a-mobile-test-harness/ Loadtimer: a mobile test harness | High Performance Web Sites

    [...] I was poking at this problem a bunch of Kindle Fire reviews came out. Most of them talked about the performance of Silk, but I was disappointed by the lack of [...]

  • http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/12/01/silk-ipad-galaxy-comparison/ Silk, iPad, Galaxy comparison | High Performance Web Sites

    [...] measuring page load times. I was motivated to create Loadtimer because recent reviews of the Kindle Fire lacked the quantified data and reliable test procedures needed to compare browser [...]

  • Dongsheng Wang

    This result is different from what Steve Souders’ findings: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/12/01/silk-ipad-galaxy-comparison/

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