Early benchmarks show that Mobile Safari got faster with iOS 6

It's customary for a new mobile OS version to bring an improved web browser and that's one of the first things to get tested. iOS 6 was only announced yesterday ,but the default browser of its beta version was already subjected to a few tests.

iOS MobileSafari
Location	WebKit Version	HTML5test.com Score	CSS3test.com Score	Sunspider 0.9.1
iOS 5.1.1	534.46	324 + 9	52%	2226.1
iOS 6.0 Beta	534.46	360 + 9	57%	1842.9

AnandTech ran some benchmarks on an iPhone 4S and noticed a notable improvement in speed and extended compatibility with new web technologies (HTML5 and CSS3). The improvement in SunSpider results is pretty impressive and sees the 4S catch up to a Snapdragon S4-packing HTC One X (the AT&T version), for example.

The results also come pretty close to those of the new iPad (which has the same two CPU cores, but a higher clock speed). It's not just JavaScript either, pages reportedly render faster and the overall experience has improved.

Interestingly, the WebKit version remains unchanged from iOS 5.1 and the browser still tells web servers it's running on iOS 5. Another thing that hasn’t changed is the 8 open tabs maximum limit.