Mobile Safari Gets Performance Boost In iPhone OS 3.0

Browsing the web on an iPhone is a pretty painless experience.  Mobile Safari is able to handle nearly anything you throw at it, except Flash of course, but with the impending iPhone OS 3.0 update things may get a little speedier. It was first reported by Wayne Pan on his personal website that Mobile Safari had received a much needed Javascript speed boost in iPhone OS 3.0.  Now Ars Technica has even more proof that the update should improve the overall speed of Mobile Safari over the iPhone OS 2.2.1 version on average by 3x.

"While the overall average gives the iPhone 3.0 beta a 300 percent speed advantage, some of the individual tests show 6x, 8x, or even 11x improvements—the bitwise "AND" function even runs 16x faster than in the current version of Mobile Safari."

The speed boost is being attributed to the utilization of the Nitro rendering engine currently being employed in Safari 4 beta. A speed boost to Javascript rendering would benefit web application users the most, but not solely.  The use of the Nitro rendering engine would increase the speed of general web surfing as well.  If the rumored new iPhone hardware contains even more processing power as expected, we may see an astounding increase in overall mobile web surfing speed. [via Ars Technica]

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