Cigniti Technologies, an independent software testing services has announced that it found Opera Mini to be ahead of UC 9.8 browser in Browser Performance in loading four of the five leading websites on Android. The announcement is part of the Browser Performance Benchmarking tests on mobile networks and carriers including Opera Mini and UC 9.8.
The tests revealed that Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Wikipedia loaded significantly faster on Opera Mini than UC 9.8 across 2G and 3G networks. The tests also concluded that UC 9.8 was better at loading YouTube in the 2G spectrum as against Opera Mini. The performance benchmark tests confirmed that Opera Mini was faster in terms of overall performance and had lower page load times as compared to UC 9.8.
With a special focus on loading web pages from Facebook on mobile phones, the tests confirmed that Opera Mini opens Facebook 34% faster on a 3G network and 27% faster on a 2G network compared to UC 9.8.
Test methodology:
Cigniti conducted the performance benchmarking exercise for the Opera Mini browser on the mid-range Samsung Grand 2 device, which is one of India’s best-selling Android smartphones. It has Android KitKat 4.4.2 version with Qualcomm MSM8226 Snapdragon 400 chipset, Quad-core Cortex CPU of 1.2 GHz and internal memory of 1 GB RAM.
The tests were carried out on Opera Mini and UC 9.8 using 5 mobile sites Google, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and Yahoo. There were 250 iterations for each of the above 5 sites on both the browsers using Airtel 2G and 3G mobile SIM carriers at a high signal strength.
The cache and history of each browser was cleared before every iteration and the ‘Page Load Time’ i.e. the time taken to load the page and ‘Data Download Size’ i.e. size of the page data which got downloaded on the mobile browser was captured for all the iterations.
PS : In response to above claim of Mini Opera, we have received objections from UC Web, which we reproduce below:
“We are from UC Browser. First, thanks for the coverage!
Secondly, we found the article and test are misleading. Here are a few things we want to clarify:
1. UC Browser 9.8 is not the most up to date version of UC Browser. Apparently, it’s unfair to compare the latest Opera Mini and an outdated UC Browser.
2. We’ve recently switched off the acceleration for UC Browser 9.8 for testing and maintanance. But it will be switched on this week.
3. UC Browser 9.9 is the most up to date version of UC Browser (released on Sep. 28th), and we are sure it’s faster than Opera Mini in terms of loading same facebook pages.
4. Opera Mini automatically opens lite version of facebook.com which is a simplified page with lots of elements being stripped off. That’s said, if you type in m.facebook.com in opera mini, it will automatically redirect to mbasic.facebook.com
We will ask Cigniti to conduct another test to compare the latest UC and Opera Mini. We will let u know the results.
Thanks!
UC Browser Product Team”
