A Comparison: Microsoft Surface and iPad 4

This week, we’ve been putting both the iPad 4 and the Microsoft Surface tablet through their paces. In our testing, we’re happy to say that both tablets are very solid HTML5 platforms. Internet Explorer 10 on the Surface has a broad, well-implemented HTML5 feature set that mostly meets and occasionally exceeds mobile Safaris. On the performance front, the iPad 4 leads in raw JavaScript and Canvas performance while the Surface has a faster SVG implementation. Having comprehensive, high performance HTML5 support is now a “must-have” feature for new mobile devices. For end users, both these devices promise great user experiences from well-designed HTML5 apps. Going into our testing, we were bringing expectations set by the iPad 3 and our developer hardware for Windows 8. When we reviewed the iPad 3 in the Spring, we were disappointed with iPad performance. Ordinary web pages as well as HTML5 apps had stutter and visible tiling. Raw JavaScript performance was actually lower on the iPad 3 than the iPad 2. In our opinion, it was an underpowered device, so we were not entirely surprised to see the iPad 4 arrive with vastly improved hardware specs so quickly. On the Microsoft front, when we took our first look at the IE10 preview last Fall, we were very impressed with its HTML5 feature list, but wondered if performance would hold up on tablet-grade hardware. Read on to see what we found.

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