iOS 5 beats Android in HTML5 browser test

Sencha works with frameworks that are used in creating web apps for HTML5 and for this the company needs advance features such as transitions, reflections, animations and geo-locations.

“After putting the Galaxy Nexus through our test wringer, we can say that Ice Cream Sandwich is a major step for the Android browser. However, it still falls short of iOS 5,” Sencha’s senior director of product management, Aditya Bansod, wrote in a blog post.

Sencha’s latest evaluation focused on Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus which is powered by Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

An advantage of the Ice Cream Sandwich is full CSS3 effects support which offers smooth transitions and animations that help make web apps look like native apps. This gives developers the chance to come up with rich user interfaces with the help of the latest Android OS.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich also supports embedded HTML5 audio and video. The Galaxy Nexus was able to play an inline video, something that was previously impossible even on the iPhone and the iPad.

However, in a head-to-head test of HTML5 features iOS 5 was the winner thanks to Ice Cream Sandwich lacking support of Web Workers and Web Sockets, meaning that it can’t update web apps in real-time and users have to constantly refresh the pages.

In addition, Android’s weaker support for various input types proved to be a setback for Google.