Late on Thursday, after Podjarny's response was sent in an e-mail, Blaze to add that even with the optimizations in the embedded browser, the impact might not be major.

The Blaze blog also noted that while Apple noted only a one-second difference in loading apps on the two devices, the loading gap was greater on many sites, including up to 10 seconds slower on the iPhone when loading the Web site.

It isn't clear what Apple plans for improvements to its embedded browser. Muller said Apple would not discuss plans for any updates to the embedded Web viewer. The Safari optimizations came with the iOS 4.3 update in early March.

In its study, Blaze noted that it had used Apple's UIWebView embedded browser (or viewer) for its study, and had installed a custom testing app to do its Web page-loading measurements. UIWebView is a kind of WebKit open source technology; Android has a similar embedded browser in its Nexus S and other Android 2.3 devices. The Android embedded browser is called WebView, and is also based on WebKit.

UIWebView allows programmers to embed a Web browser into an app.