The swords are out and Opera and UCWeb are in no mood to keep them down. UCBrower recently declared that their UC browser for Android is the fastest kid around and went on to pull the rug under the rival Opera by saying the UC 9.8 is faster than Opera Mini when loading Facebook from mobile phones. It didn’t take much time for Opera to return with a vengeance and with a report on hand. Opera has now pounced back on UCWeb by not just refuting the claim but saying that unless an independent report vouches for the UC story, their in-house report card is just not credible enough. Further they have asked a third-party testing firm to conduct the tests and see how wins the lighting browser on the smartphone crown. Cigniti Technologies, an independent software testing service firm has been approached by Opera to conduct a benchmarking test to compare Facebook load times on Opera Mini vs UC 9.8. And here is what Opera claims the results are from the independent test ” Opera Mini opens Facebook 34% faster on a 3G network and 27% faster on a 2G network compared to UC 9.8” So UCWeb your turn now. For now, it is advantage Opera.

How the browser test was conducted

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. To find out the page loading time for Facebook (m.facebook.com) on Opera Mini and UC 9.8, the test was carried out using Airtel 2G and 3G mobile SIM carriers at a high signal strength. There were 250 iterations on both browsers on 3G and 2G network. The Caches and histories of each browser were cleared before every iteration and the “Page Load Time” i.e. the time taken to load the page was captured for all the iterations.]]>