I find it interesting that the study found Android to be so markedly better only for sites that weren't optimized for mobiles. On mobile-friendly sites, the median was quite close and even in iOS's favor: "The two operating systems were much more closely matched for mobile specific websites with Android only faster three per cent of the time, with a median load time of 2.085 seconds versus the Iphone's 2.024 seconds."

I don't think for a moment that the difference in load times for mobile-friendly sites (about 3%) is significant, given the errors inherent in such a test, and the results for non-optimized sites clearly show that there is a lot of merit to Android's browser stack. Rather, I bring this up because I think it reflects on Apple's design philosophy as compared with Google's. Whereas Apple designs for their ideal of what the Web should be, Google designs for the Web that actually exists. One could argue that Apple's approach is better in the long-term, but I don't think that I agree. They've taken a lot of liberties with the idea of a web standard, after all, and seem to be banking on their market power to ensure that their technical strategy works. On the other hand, Google's approach is more developer friendly, I think, in that it treats standards as tools which may or may not be employed by individual web development teams.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but all the same, I do think there's some room for very interesting analysis--- The Inquirer missed an opportunity here to delve deeper. Alas.