Android 2.2′s browsing performance is now much faster than on any iOS device, a new round of tests has discovered. In JavaScript, used most often by web apps but also by many other sites, a Nexus One running 2.2 was twice as fast as an iPhone 4 in the universal SunSpider test run by Ars Technica and over four times faster in the V8 test.

Apple’s mobile version of Safari has often been touted as the fastest, but the loss of a speed edge has been credited largely to an upgrade of the rendering engine in Android, which as of 2.2 uses the same Chrome engine as the desktop. The OS itself has a slew of extra upgrades as it now has a just-in-time compiler and other optimizations that speed up apps on the same hardware.

Hardware may not necessarily be a factor. Apple hasn’t detailed the clock speed of the A4 in the iPhone 4, but any drop below the Nexus One’s 1GHz may be offset by the significantly newer, faster graphics core. Both phones have 512MB of RAM.

The speed may only apply to a pure install of Android 2.2, as Flash 10 bogs it down to where a previous-generation iPhone 3GS with 3.x firmware is noticeably faster.