Is UIWebview JS performance slower than iOS 6/7 mobile safari?

Question

We recently tested some HTML5 content using powerful javascript libraries from an iOS application. The application is designed to load this content into UIWebview. IOS 6 was used for this testing. My team did not notice any noticeable performance problems in the mobile safari browser. But on the Internet and in other stackoverflow discussions (like this one is a link ), experts claim that UIWebview skips the Nitro Javascript Engine, so it is usually much slower than Mobile Safari Browser.

Is this not a problem with the latest versions of iOS (6/7 beta)?

Is there a way to check and observe the performance difference between UIWebview and Mobile Safari browser?

Answer 1

Yes, there is a way to appreciate the differences.

First run this test in Safari: http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html

Then create a simple application containing a UIWebView and let it open the URL. Now run the application on your tablet / phone and run the test again in your UIWebView.

My results on the iPad 2 iOS 6.1.3:

Safari Total: 1490.8ms UIWebView Total: 5496.8ms