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Browser Speed Comparisons
kfrench writes "Internet browser speed tests for 'cold starts', 'warm starts', rendering CSS, rendering tables, script execution, displaying multiple images and 'history'. 'Opera seems to be the fastest browser for Windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice.'"
Firefox and Opera make tabs quicker than IE.
...is that a motivated user can compile an optimized version or download an optimized build.
That option certainly isn't available in IE or Opera.
The Army reading list
lynx...is there anything it can't do?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
On my Windows 2000 Professional machine, it's always been quite slow on startup. I hope they'll be able to speed up it in future releases.
one order of the Internet, two browsers and a side of standards compliance, please!
The ugly truth is, I must use IE sometimes. All that microsoft extension stuff... still used way too much for me to get along without it.
This makes official what I've noticed about Mac OS X - Safari is a fantastic browser, even better than Firefox. WTG Apple!
Is "not faster" a euphemism for slower?
To say that my camry is not faster than a porche 929 is a true statement when interpreted one way, but untrue when interpreted another. The use of amphiboly to lead someone to an erroneous conclusion is only different from an outright lie its craftiness.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I thought I could get first post, but my browser rendered the page too slowly. Guess I'll have to switch to Opera.
Interesting results. Firefox may be slower at rendering than IE and Opera, but I love the Firefox extension that disables auto-running flash elements in a page. For whatever reason, my work computer locks up on certain flash pages and this was a huge help.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
I suppose the fact that IE has all sorts of nice direct access to the Windows code with god-knows-what tricks embedded to speed it up helps. Firefox is bound by what any non-MS program can do with the API.
That is not to say that I find Firefox slower - but thinking about it, I believe the Firefox interface (especially tabs and yes I know it was Opera first(?)) speeds _me_ up. So my perception is that using Firefox is generally faster than using Internet Explorer, even though it may be in actuality slower.
Really impressive work by that tester tho.:-)
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
But aren't later versions better, more capable, more adverse-effects resistant?
Also, a browser can render much more quickly if it doesn't care how badly it renders what you see. How does this balance with the loading times in the article?
"Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice."
And this has what to do with speed testing?
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
The one they never include.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Can we get a realistic test? Lets see how quick IE is after a couple of days browsing some of the.... less family friendly websites. Firefox would rape it hands down.
I like muppets.
*] Lynx
. . . but nothing beats it's stability on my 500MHz G4 powerbook.
When you can't have speed, it's nice to have stability.
Pretty Pictures!
I recently switched to Firefox and on NTBugTraq last week, 3 exploits were announced with status of patched. I ran check for updates on firefox and reported nothing. I check A noticed a bunch of other vunerabilities that say patched yet firefox.exe says there's no updates. I went to mozilla.org and even the default download is to the original 1.0 build. What gives? I'd expect update to actually work, there's no way i can install firefox on my parents machines because the only way they actually apply patches is when windows update actually downloads and prompts them. I can tell my parents to find the buried update feature and run it everyday, and that doesn't even seem to work.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I don't know about everyone else but I did not move to Firefox becuase I thought it was fatser. I moved over because of the relative securty and opposed to IE and the super-neato plugins. Without mousegestures, webrowsing just isn't the same. Besides, most people who use Broadband internet won't notice a difference between browser speed. Ossus
Unfortunately, this meant rolling back to Internet Explorer. While I personally prefer Opera, most of the users agreed that Internet Explorer did the best at talking with the internet after this experiment.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I find it laughable, that although Firefox appears to be short in the speed department (at least it loads faster than the current version of Mozilla I'm running on my laptop), the author still feels he needs to shill Firefox by expounding its totally unrelated virtues.
The actual MS Internet Explorer was not tested :(
I am talking about the one loaded with spyware and viruses.
...on returning the error message when the server is being pummeled by Slashdot readers?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Gee, who would have thunk it.
We've known for ages that Moz takes forever to load and uses more ram and blah blah blah. I mean, it's been nicknamed RAMZilla fer cryin' out loud.
So? An extra few seconds or couple of megs of ram don't matter. Really, they don't. Security and features and ease of use matter.
"So I says to Mable, "Hey, those are MY ferrets!"
Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice. However, it is still not as fast as Opera, and Opera also offers a high level of standards support, security and features.
This statement obscures the truth, which is that Firefox takes twice as long as Internet Explorer to load from a cold start (12 seconds versus 7) and 50% longer to load from a warm start (2.52 versus 1.7)
This "not faster" thing will live on in Slashdot history -- just Beowulf cluster
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Any time I saved today using my ultra-fast browser was just wasted reading this fascinating article, instead of doing my work. Ah well, back to the grindstone.
Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer
Or, put differently, Internet Explorer is faster than Firefox...but I guess we aren't allowed to say that on here.
I don't have you on my foes list, but I have put a few people on mine. I use it to keep from having to see people who are consistently modded up to +3 or higher for political flamebait, apply -6 to foes and say goodbye to another rabid loudmouth.
Something I've noticed recently is that Google Maps are much faster on IE than on Firefox.
To try for yourself, go to http://maps.google.com, then double-click anywhere to the side of the map display. It will automatically re-center to wherever you clicked. I've found the re-centering is MUCH faster (and smoother) on IE than on Firefox...
Could I be missing something? Perhaps there's some way to make it faster on Firefox?
CONTEST: "Internet browser speed tests"
WINNER: "IE Not fastest, Mozilla not fastest. NOT Either"
SLASHDOT's summary summary: "Well... we won in security and this other thing, and you are a poo head."
Christ. Grow up.
For those that haven't heard of it, here's the description from the homepage:
K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform based on the Gecko layout engine (the rendering engine of Mozilla).
And still, i would rather chew my leg of than using Internet Explorer. An open, bloody would is a much safer choice ;)
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
was a a comparison of which OS is fastest for browsing, and which was fastest in each browser.
Maybe even comaprisons by different Linux distributions.
... I don't care about speed in a browser, difference of 2 or less seconds? who cares.
ajf
There doesn't seem to be an allowance for correctness of rendering and conformity of the javascript implementation. If you discard all requirements for rendering and outcome of the script, cat(1) is the fastest browser hands down. Which explains Opera's performance; Opera's rendering and scripting off by just the tiniest bit in every conceivable feature. There's a definite speed/correctness tradeoff and Mozilla has always opted for correctness when practical.
From the article:
Surprisingly, Mozilla is now faster at most tasks than Firefox.
Again, I ask--what exactly is the point of Firefox these days? When it was being billed as the replacement for Mozilla's browser, it made more sense. But Firefox is neither faster or slimmer than the official Mozilla browser, and now it seems it's actually slower too!
I'm just curious what the incentive is supposed to be to use it over Mozilla.
I'll know which browser to use to reload Slashdot over and over to get first post.
It's nice to see something on /. that isn't blatantly pro-Firefox and anti-IE. Good research.
For my browser choice, a few fractions of a second rendering doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy. I get my cyber jollies from using a browser that has the least number of vulnerabilities. Afterall, those few milliseconds don't add up to the all the down time you might otherwise be stuck with.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
From the article:
The Moox Firefox install is actually slower than the standard Firefox versions distributed from Mozilla.org, even though it is supposedly optimised for my particular processor.
Personally IE might load quicker than FireFox, however IE takes like 20 seconds in order for a site to be fully rendered after startup. Where as FireFox might take 3 seconds to fire up (pun intended) and render the page in 2 seconds.
I got this from Konqueror:
A script on this page is causing KHTML to freeze. If it continues to run, other applications may become less responsive.
Do you want to abort the script?
Sad. Yet funny at the same time.
After a fresh install, IE may be faster than Firefox but once a non-saavy person starts using IE, all of the junk that will get installed because of it will definitely cause IE to be a hog, allowing Firefox to blow past it.
So, no browser is set to "quick launch", except for IE, which quick launches because Microsoft has artificially and unnecessarily integrated it into Windows.
That is not a good comparison. Apples to apples, morons--IE loads with Windows, so the IE cold start time is measured from the power button, not after "all the background processes" (including IE components) are loaded.
Or, you use quick launch with Mozilla (and Opera if available, IDK) and compare warm launch times from equal footing.
IE cold launch times are a result of deliberate cheating--and the configuration of this test intentionally helps IE.
DJ
And considerably tastier, too.
This would be a lot more useful with bar charts rather than numbers.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Ooops, better up that to 16. Good thing you're counting Windows Server 2003 and not Windows XP Home edition, huh there?
Like 8192x8192 - Firefox doesn't seem to notice ..
that its getting more and more of paged out
memory and just keeps allocating effectively
freezing the machine at some point
I tested browsers myself a while back with Stopwatch, and I found Firefox to render consistently faster than IE6. I collaborated with others on the test, and we found that overall, Firefox was about 25% faster. There were some exceptions to the rule though... (most notably, mozilla.org rendered faster in IE. But Microsoft.com rendered faster on Firefox).
I honestly don't know what this guy did differently to achieve opposite results.
What kind of timing device did he use?
Did he used a Swatch Watch?
IE is only faster than Firefox if IE is too full of worms and spywae to start quickly.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The author didn't say whether he defraged the disk, or whether he had any of the programs preinstalled and frequently used on windows.
Since windows optimizes according to usage, this could pontentiall make a massive difference in speed.
Firefox is faster all around for me than IE as far as I can tell. Of course even if it weren't there are other features that are of sufficient importance to me that I'd stick with Firefox even f there was a slight speed hit.
Also I seem to recall that you can preload Firefox, which would make 'loading' seem even faster. Since much of IE is preloaded into memory that would make the comparison more apples to apples.
LetterRip
Now, mind you, I have no reason to doubt this guy's methods, and haven't any reason to think he's biased in any way, which he probably is not.
This said, some findings here, at least with regards to $gecko and IE, go smack against repeated tests I did during heavy browser performance testing at my job. This was about... 2 years ago, I guess? Maybe more.
In testing the cumulative rendering time for Mozilla (no firefox existed at the time) and IE across a mere five pages, Moz turned out to be quite a bit faster, although I can't remember the total difference, without digging out those old tests.
Now, the main purpose of the test was to examine proxied vs non-proxied browser performance (which, in both cases, gecko saw about a 31% improvement vs. about 20% for IE), so for a performance test, 5 websites is not a good enough representative sample. However, running it against 50 websites, similar numbers were reached, with regards to both the overall rendering speed times and the proxied browser performance.
YMMV, but I saw definite speed improvements over IE with gecko during my series of tests.
here is a list of things that can make your firefox render and download faster.
This has been popping up on del.icio.us/popular for a while now:
Speeding up Firefox the right way.
This page contains detailed tips about getting the fastest firefox experience, customized to different speed computers and network connections.
I recently switched back from Firefox to Maxthon (used to be MyIE2) because the speed difference was just too great.
With all the time I'm saving surfing, I can restore my Windows partitions with Acronis once a month and still be ahead of schedule compared to using Firefox.
My Tech Posts on Twitter
What is the point of this? I thought browser speed just didnt matter anymore, at least it doesnt to me. Does anyone even notice rendering anymore? I dont use a computer slow enough, nor have internet fast enough (only a T1) to notice any damn difference. This might have been interesting in the ancient slow days but anymore? come on?
And just how do you test a cold boot of IE? reboot the computer? And if your not using windows why would you ever shut off your browser?
it can't provide rich multimedia experiences for me to become emersed in the product vision!
my linux laptop has an 800 mhz crusoe processor and ddr ram. using firefox, even under fluxbox, is neigh-on-unbearable.
i have to run opera, its the only thing fast enough. admitantly, i am a bit of a tab addict, but opera doesnt seem to care whether i have 20 tabs open or 200. firefox barely moves at 20.
a lot of it is about the instant reaction. i can hit control-n at any time and no matter how busy opera is, how packed my cpu is, opera will throw open a new window immediately and let me start typing in my address. even under duress & system lag, it still knows what i've asked it to do and will respond as appropriate.
loading & rendering web pages i couldnt give a rats about. whats important is how responsive the application is. take all the time you want, as long as you're giving me the priority to do as i please while your app takes its damned time.
Myren
Translation: "I don't agree with the results of the test, so I'm just going to arbitrarily dismiss them for no other reason than I don't like Firefox being slower than Internet Explorer! So I'm just going to claim Firefox would rape Internet Explorer to placate my viewpoint."
Firefox didn't really focus THAT much on speed for 1.0, but in creating a standards compliant browser that's incredibly easy to use and extend. I don't doubt that for Firefox 2.0 there will be a big focus on speed and hand optimization of various slow bits of the code.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I wondered why clue was so bad at the speedtest, so I googled it. The Homepage was quite informative.
It's written in Java.
Java bashers, here's your chance!
See pictures of tits
From the article:
The performance of K-Meleon and Epiphany was similar to the performance of Mozilla and Firefox on the same platform.
If you're running a five year old computer. Couldn't he at least have found a test machine over 1 GHz?
Who cares a fig of browser X is 43 nanoseconds slower than browser Y when rendering a page.
Not me. I give a fig that browser X doesn't allow "the bad people" to take over my computer just by looking at their web site.
If I wanted speed I'd use good old links.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Each intermediate page must be allowed to load completely ... This means that any indicators that the browser provides to show that the page is loading must show the page as loaded before navigating to the next page.
If you read this, you'll know that these benchmarks are mostly useless. How many people wait until a page is completely finished loading before looking at it or clicking links?
Users will tell you that Browser A "feels" faster than Browser B. This doesn't mean that A downloads and renders the entire page faster than B. It means that A displays the necessary content faster than B.
I don't care if it takes 2.5 seconds to load a page if I can see 75% of the content after 0.6 seconds.
Who cares when the progress bar disappears?
There are a bunch of things I'd have done differently when doing a report like this.
The most important one is trying to measure something as close as possible to the Web browsing experience. That means loading pages over a network (at 56K, DSL, Cable, and/or T1 speeds, with some latency) rather than from local files, and loading pages that look more like a random sampling of Web pages rather than constructed examples (e.g., a page with tons of absolutely positioned elements). When the author of the test constructs examples like those used here for the "Rendering CSS", "Rendering Table", "Script speed", and "Multiple Images" benchmarks, the results will have a bias (relative to average performance browsing the Web) towards one browser or another. I'm not saying the author of the tests chose to bias it in a certain direction; merely that constructed tests like this will always have some bias. When such tests become widely used by the press (as iBench has), it even leads browser makers to optimize for the tests rather than for what matters for users.
Also, when testing startup times on Linux (especially cold startup), it makes a huge difference whether starting in a KDE (QT-based environment), GNOME (GTK+-based environment), or other environment, since it affects which shared libraries are already in memory. Testing Mozilla's startup times under GNOME (especially if using a GTK2 version of Mozilla under GNOME 2, or a GTK1 version of Mozilla under GNOME 1) would have improved its performance significantly.
Finally, Mozilla 1.8 hasn't been released yet, so I'm a little puzzled how it was tested. The released version will have changes from the current development version, so it will perform differently. It may be a slight difference, but the report should really say exactly what is tested.
What I love about Opera is that it is fast with all of its features turned on. To have similar functionality on Firefox I need a dozen plugins that are not seamlesly integrated and that weight the browser down.
Still, for most people I recomend Firefox. Its lack of ads and free price cannot be beaten and its default feature set don't confuse people who switch fron IE.
Either way you can't loose. Its the only way to live malware free.
Cheers,
Adolfo
just as _super_fast_ as links
but gui (X) with tables and graphics
links2 -g rocks, see http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/l inks/
of course, if you want speed and gui
you will already be using dillo
www.dillo.org
you'd be daft to use anything else for default reading of HTML files from your ROX-filer
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
This first post brought to you by Firefox!!!!
I'm all for OpenSource and Free Software, but you do have a point. I don't really benefit by having access to the source code either way because I'm not a programmer. With my car, I don't change my own oil. I don't really care how hard it is to reach the plug as long as I like the car and the filters aren't too expensive. I just don't care as long as I don't have to waste my Saturday morning getting dirty when I can pay somebody to do it for me. I suppose I'm just as ambivalent about source code and browsers. IE on the Mac is now a moot point and Safari seems to be filling in the gap nicely for me.
Allow me to compare: open source champions are kinda like the folks who like to work on their own cars--they want access to the pieces and parts they can use their own tools on. For the rest of us, we don't really care--IE comes with Windows for free and likewise Safari on the Mac. I don't care about tweaking it as long as it gets the job done. If I'd rather be a DIY kinda guy, then I can choose amongst the "kit cars" out there. I like the choice.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
It is interesting to note, that regardless of the author's observation that Firefox is Linux optimized, it was faster in nearly all meaningful categories of rendering on Windows -- often substantially faster. Firefox is clearly a Windows browser that is simply well-designed enough to run on other platforms.
Let's look at the tests..
1. Cold start
Doesn't exist in IE and konqueror it's embeded into the OS.
2. Warm start
Doesn't exist in IE and konqueror it's embeded into the OS.
3. Rendering CSS
Great tests except, how well do both browsers follow the specification, and how fault tollerent are they?
4. Rendering table
5. Script speed
As will CSS, it doesn't mean shit if the browser doesn't comply with standards.
6. Multiple images.
Should have stored the data locally and cleared out the browsers cache, too much error in this test.
7.History
Next time try it with 1000 1024x1024 jpegs on each page.
What I want to know is.
how good are the browsers under load.
I known that Firefox and Konqueror choke if the active page and all embeded is too big e.g. a 100k page with links to 1000 1024x1024 jpegs.
How good are the browsers when I have 50 tabs open, because I haven't closed them all day.
Testing is all well and good, but when you browser starts running slow because of all the viruses you've picked up you'd wish it was a built a bit better instead of a little faster.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
...internet research scientists have been asked, urged, ordered and bribed to change their browser performance results to favor business interests.
I could give a rat's ass less if a browser is a second faster, I want it to display the CSS and whatnot correctly--each time.
IE displays the page correctly, groovy. Firefox 1.0 still has the CSS sliding image bug, not groovy. They gotta fix that.
Few people (mainly those in libraries/'net cafes, and privacy nuts) use a "clean" browser. Most people will have hundreds, often thousands, of links in their browser history, tens of megabytes in the cache, a big collection of bookmarks, and plugins like Flash and toolbars. In my experience, a browser will be nice and snappy fresh out of the box, but after a few weeks of piling these things on, it may slow significantly, either in its startup time or while browsing. Some browsers may be worse than others in this regard. The author of the linked article has done an outstanding job, but since it appears most of the tests were performed on freshly-installed, "clean" browsers, the results should be considered with caution.
Can we get a realistic test? Lets see how quick IE is after a couple of days browsing some of the.... less family friendly websites. Firefox would rape it hands down.
r /
Internet Explorer can be *very* secure by setting the slider to highest as demonstrated here:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/ie_security_humo
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
than the "normal" version?
From TFA:
"Windows speed chart - times are given in seconds"
Firefox 1.0 (Moox):
20.33,2.78,3.18,1.57,26,2.84,41
Firefox 1.0:
11.54,2.52,1.81,1.48,23,2.05,41
Can anybody explain to me? The "unoptimized version" performs better than the optimized one?
O_o
You're right, obviously something's wrong here. Somebody please give the guy the REAL optimized version.
it's free, and it's Free. Who cares if one browser is milliseconds faster or slower?
NO CARRIER
IE under Wine is faster than Firefox on my Linux system. Explain that, buddy.
Meant to quote this too:
One thing I do not take into account here (although it can play a significant role in real pages) is progressive rendering. For example, with Opera 6, the table was laid out faster, but nothing was displayed until the entire table was complete. With Opera 7+, the table takes longer to complete (about half a second), but it is progressively displayed, so the first part is displayed as soon as it is ready, without having to wait for the rest of the table to complete. As a result, you can actually start reading the page faster with Opera 7+. With pages that are served by slow servers (or if you have a slower connection), this can make overall browsing speed significantly faster.
I'm not sure I'd trust this guy's results without knowing more about his testing environment. How exactly did he time these tests? Was it using the second hand on his analog watch? Did he do it with a stopwatch?
Honestly, what is the meaning of 0.47 and 0.48 seconds to start the browser when he easily could be off by a third of a second?
I say lucky Firefox, they didn't test performance of plugins.
"Cold" opening a PDF file (with Acrobat Reader not running) is one of most painful experiences ever. The only worst thing on the Web is CLOSING a tab with PDF file open in it. It takes like 45 seconds (which often needs be assisted with CTRL-ALT-DEL and killing areader.exe).
I use Firefox for 90% of my HTTP(S) needs - all respects, it's a nice and good browser, but it not as stable and fast as MS IE.
It is intolerably poor with layered rendering.
.gif, with two black pixels and two transparent ones, to darken out your background for say, a forum.
It won't render transparent pngs, or make any use of alpha masking in png data. Worse, try this:
Make a webpage with a complex background image.
Now make a table with a different background image, a 2x2
Load the page in Mozilla or Firefox. Works just fine.
Load it in IE. Grab a cup of coffee while you wait.
I am a science fantasy fan
Really? Or do you think that you are getting Windows with your new PC for free too?
Logic, macros, and more
I'm assuming that the tests were run a fresh machine. I guarantee that if these tests were run in "real" environments (read: IE is crippled from Spyware/Adware) then Firefox would easily win.
Here's a better idea for a test:
Take two grade school kids, middle school kids, high school kids, college kids, and a 20-something people.
Give each of them identical hardware/software with the exception that one group gets IE and the other Firefox.
Have them surf the web for a week (normal surfing habbits).
Bring the computers back into the lab and then determine which browser is faster. I'm willing to bet a good chunk of money that the firefox computers will be able to render the pages faster than the IE computers infested with spyware/adware.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
From the article:
"Hardware; 400 MHz G4, 256 MB RAM. Supposedly the Harvard architecture of the G4 chip makes this approximately equivalent to an 800 MHz Intel Pentium chip"
Pardon me? What is he talking about?
I'm actually a bit impressed with how well the 400MHz Mac numbers came out compared to the 800MHz PC numbers, that is Linux and Windows. Especially since they all had 256MB of RAM which everyone seems to say is not enough RAM for running OS X acceptably. The script speed seems to be the only dog for Safari. Perhaps this is something I should be mentioning to potential switchers.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
where is mosaic?
I certainly don't agree with that assessment. OK, this isn't exactly a fancy empiracal test, but my wife and I both experience noticably faster page loading using FireFox. We noticed this better performance both under dial up and cable. And for wife to admit that FireFox is faster than IE is really saying something, because she's the biggest M$ lover that I ever met.
They didn't bother to test The Off By One Browser which is easily the fastest graphical browser available for Windows. It now supports tabbed browsing, BTW. Lynx, of course, is the fastest browser period. Netscape Navigator Gold was pretty speedy in its time (and still is), but OffByOne runs circles around it in terms of speed.
Firefox v. IE - there are IE tweaks just like ones you find for Firefox. Once I compare my tweaked IE 6.0, it renders amazon.com faster but microsoft.com slower (how ironic
So you want the IE tweaks (for faster Internet Connections) so we begin to compare apples and apples?
First, I'd recommend downloading a free program to edit the registry, because it has a history of previous locations visited...very useful for me to remember the tweaks.
Then, goto OK, add two new keys to have more simultaneous connections: Ok...now move to eliminate searching of Scheduled Task on the local network when loading Explorer, goto location and remove the {2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D} key.
You may need to restart Windows (or maybe just IE) and you should notice a speedup.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
From the article:
Conclusions
No, no. That is up to you. It all depends on how you use your browser and what you use it for, and what operating system(s) you use it on.
So, for the majority of us that means the likely conclusion is that Opera 8.0 handles surfing pr0n on Linux the best.
Get a clue...it's not that Open Source is automatically faster, leaner, meaner, more secure...whatever. Open Source is a philosophy more than anything else. There was a time when only the the leaders of politics and religion knew how to read and write, hence their powers (remember the "scribes" of the Bible / Torah?). The common people just labored powerlessly and did whatever they were told. This was closed-source philosophy: "just us, not you".
This is all about power. The technology sector has immense power and influence over vast swaths of human interaction and culture, and both Microsoft and Apple want to keep outsiders at bay and keep people software-dependent on their shoddy, bloated crapware! Apple is just a Microsoft wannabe in terms of power and influence. Apple is to Microsoft what North Korea is to the former Soviet Union. Draconian, insular, paranoid and proud and boastful for no justifiable reason.
Open Source shall set the world free of "us only" tyranny. It's just one more branch in a much wider social war.
Actually, IE and Windows both come with a very heavy price: your soul.
Hyperbole aside, Windows is expensive in terms of time if not money. Time spent fortifying a PC against spyware, viruses, and exploits is time I'd surely rather spend elsewhere.
Of course, I could run Linux as my desktop and spend even more time trying to make the damn thing work as smoothly as my Mac. [For my servers, though, I totally prefer Linux but not for my desktop and browsing.] Again, YMMV. It's an opinion, not necessarily yours.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
... All my logins are on my Camino keychain and there's no migration tool for keychains to Safari, and Camino seems to behave better (though at this point it's pretty much a wash)..
Still, I'd be interested to see benches on some of the newer 0.9ish nightlies..
...I've searched everywhere and I can't find it... I'm interested in the Linux version of this fantastic browser...
Let's not forget that Firefox barfs on some 100% standard (strict, even) HTML, while IE renders it perfectly.
--
Yes
It's true
IE > You
While these tests are nice for having empirical data, it's also important to not focus too much on this data. In many cases, the differences in results was not much more than a second. IE sucks for many reasons that are not its speed. Firefox and Opera have far more benefits other than what speed it displays pages at.
The point is, for most of these browsers, they all run 'fast enough.' A second or two here and there isn't going to significantly impact your browsing experience. Tabs, intelligent UI design, intelligent security decisions, and perhaps themes/extensions will add up to the overall experience.
Why did they choose an epiphany release that is well over a year old? Every other browser(maybe with the exception of konqueror) was at the latest release.
IE is a slimmed down browser where I can imagine its rendering engine simplicity combined with Microsoft's unique experience with the Windows kernel and the integration makes for a fast browser.
Opera seems to be a minor miracle in terms of code optimizations, at least on the Windows platform, since it's not OS integrated or cheats with pre-loadings, and the Opera team lacks Microsoft developers with knowledge about undocumented API calls, etc. Still it usually beats IE hands down with a vastly superior rendering engine, on par with Gecko. It's only unfortunate it's ad supported and closed source.
Finally, Firefox/Gecko is a very nice open source browser with nice extension support, but building on the cross-platform UI toolkit XUL instead of using native widgets, along with being built for platform independence instead of being heavily optimized for various platforms (I imagine the Opera team has to do more work for their browser to work on other platforms). I think some of these things play a role in some of Firefox's speed issues. There's no problem with the code I think, just a side effect from what Mozilla is trying to accomplish with the code.
It would've been interesting to have him compare to K-Meleon or Galeon as well, since it's slimmed down to the bare bones Gecko layout engine with just minor stuff in addition, and that stuff is also using native widgets AFAIK. Might have a positive effect on the loading times at least.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I love the slashdot commentary. IE performs OK-to-well on some guy's rudimentary speed benchmark and people go nuts.
:)
If you're going to post a story purely about a browser speed test, is it really necessary to make the comment that you shouldn't be using one of the browsers because of non-speed-related issues? It isn't really even an MS-vs-Others article, and you're just showing your rabid zealotry if you try to make it into one. (Although I realize that's the Slashdot Way).
Given the rigor of these tests (not much), the reaction here should really just be 'interesting, not that useful, moving on now'.
XP has an optimization that arranges your disk for the programs you use most.
Firefox starts up nearly instantly on my machine, Internet Explorer takes 5-10 seconds to start. Its *very* noticably slower.
This is because I use only Firefox and not Internet Explorer. (Credit to MS for the feature).
If he thinks Internet Explorer is faster then he isn't a Firefox user, the defaults in XP favour Internet Explorer.
It's either the network connection itself (especially on dial-up/ISDN/xDSL) or the server. So, fine.. if I use a browser which takes half a second longer to render a page, so what. I've just waited 30 seconds to get half a page from an overloaded server which lives on another continent. Curious that such other limitations should go without mention at the home of the Slashdot Effect.
In any case, with Internet Explorer, you get browser helpers like CoolWebSearch, IGetNet, HomeOldSP and many, many more all for free! (even if you don't want them).I'll stick with Firefox. On every site I test with my own machine, Firefox has always loaded the page faster. I use this point to convert people all the time. They don't care about Microsoft versus open source but when they see that Firefox just runs better, they switch.
Is it just me, or is browsing Apple's store really slow and painful in Safari, yet zippy with Firefox?
I would actually like to see a comparison of a P3 optimized Firefox (Moox) against Opera. My guess is that Opera uses speed optimizations for higher end processors that would not be available in the vanilla distro of Firefox.
Another question is, did they test the free "Adware" version of Opera or did they use the $40 "Commercial" version (I know Opera 8 was the Beta, so that one is obvious)?
I would personally like to see if Firefox could beat Opera with processor specific speed optimizations and some fairly standard performance tweaks to the about:config...remember, these optimizations would not be available on Opera...
I would also like to see how the much used Adblock extension slows down or speeds up Firefox in rendering some basic pages.
I've been using OSS in Windows, and every so often, I try Linux again to see if it's ready.
I have 6 PCs in my house -- two off-the-shelf brand name desktops, and four custom-built. All six will run Windows XP, but only one of them will run Linux -- and I've tried multiple distributions -- they won't even boot live CDs. I get inscrutable error messages, and no luck solving the issue on message boards. Tech support? Sorry, none for the free distributions.
Linux may work smoothly -- if you can ever get it installed.
Last time I used Opera it was faking tabs using MDI, which drove me around the bend. Does it have real tabs yet?
Of course this is somewhat of an extereme scenario, so I don't know how much use this information is for most people.
sic transit gloria mundi
http://litepc.com/ allows you to remove IE from Windows. Ideally these tests would be performed on Windows 98lite and then add a standalone version of IE so that you don't have the dll's preloaded at boot time. IE, is after all, one of the main reasons why Windows boots so slowly. Remove it if you don't believe me and find out how much your system improves.
...the firefox users then go on to add dozens of extensions/plugins whatever, bringing you right back where you started from, more or less, most generally speaking. It's the same deal then, just duplicating effort with the suite in a way. I still use moz suite because it renders better, works better and is faster and less buggy. I keep trying firefox and every time I go back to the suite. When that changes and FF is actually faster and better I'll switch, but until then I use a browser and email all the time anyway, handy to just have them both be there from mashing one button. I count both FF and tbird together as an actual legit comparison with the suite if you want to be fair about it really, at a minimum, and that's leaving out irc chat and the composer web page editor. Run four very similar programs at the same time and compare it to just turning moz's 4 programs on, that's an honest test then. I would think moz would still do better over all, combined cpu and memory. Just a guess though and absolutely no biggee. Not dissin FF but for a lot of people moz is still better.
And I just might switch to opera if the talking features ever make it to the linux builds and it actually works, I like that idea immensely and I like some of the other features in opera as well, along with some of the features in Konq. They are all good enough, just depends on what you want to do. I see good stuff and bad stuff in all of them really.
And to get even more pedantic, the mac mini has re opened up Apple as a contender, I dropped out of using them when they just absolutely refused to release any entry level priced desktop that was even close to what you could get in the pc world, but now that has changed. I put up with higher priced apples for more than a decade, but when it got to the point you were still paying more than double, I just gave up and went to cheap components and linux, but linux still is sorta lacking useability wise. It's good enough for command line tweakers, but not if you want a 100% GUI that actually works, at least none of the distros I have tried so far. They get close, but have been stuck at that "close" level for too long now, IMO.
blah blah blah, just an opinion, means nothing really.
These cold start/warm start times don't mean much if you only reboot a few times a year.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Sorry, Firefox just isn't at that level yet. For example, open a new tab and then close it in Opera and you're back at the most recently used tab. Do the same in Firefox and you're at the rightmost tab. It's one of my #1 pet peeves about Firefox, which I hope they can fix.
It'd be more interesting if he'd done the study across a wider selection of hardware. You can get very different results from this sort of thing depending on your cpu, ram, hdd, etc.
;)
Also it looks like he loaded the pages off the local disk. This doesn't really test how fast the browsers can download and render the pages. It's more of a comparison of the rendering engines only.
Then there are issues, which he mentioned, such that some browsers take longer because they optimize page loads to be useful faster rather than for raw speed. Redrawing a page over and over as new content loads is bound to be slower than waiting until it's all loaded and then drawing it once.
How often do users do cold starts? I know I almost always have a browser window left open. Most people whom I've fixed their computers for seem to leave a browser window open at all times. My experience is that the browser is more important than the desktop to most users and they treat it that way. Therefore users almost never do cold starts.
Finally.. what does it matter if a browser is faster if it isn't correctly rendering the page? I can make the worlds fastest browser by just having it always display a blank page.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Meh.
Are you thinking of Microsoft breaking TCP/IP to 'fake' faster speeds of IIS and IE? It works like this: Normally when an HTTP session ends, the TCP/IP connection is torn down by the server, which according to TCP/IP standards, involves two packets: a "disconnect request" (sent by IIS or Apache to the browser) and then a "disconnect acknowledge" (sent by the browser back to the server to acknowledge that the disconnect was received. When the client receives the "disconnect" it sends the ACK and closes up the socket on its side; when the server receives the "disconnect ACK", the connection is fully closed and the resources it uses are freed up on the server side. Under normal conditions, if the occasional ACK happens to get lost, then all that happens is that the TCP/IP socket remains open for usually about another two minutes until it times out from inactivity and gets cleaned up by the OS anyway (if you "netstat -a" you should see these hanging around for a little while).
Now, Microsoft did two things: they modified TCP/IP when in conjunction with Internet Explorer to not send the disconnect ACK, and they modified IIS to not wait until it received the ACK to close and free up the socket, but rather to close it and free up the associated resources immediately. This perversion of the very open standard on which the Internet was founded has the following effects:
This whole rather unethical bit of sliminess was primarily concocted to not only make IIS artificially appear faster during benchmarks, but to artificially slow Apache down (because Microsoft was getting frustrated that IIS was unable to kick the Linux/Apache servers' asses).
I think another thing this demonstrates is that closed source browsers (Safari on OS X and IE on Windows) are still head and shoulders above their open source counterparts. The hype behind Open Source just never seems to let up, so it gets a lot of press but when it comes right down to where the rubber meets the road, closed source software is pretty much always better.
If anything, the results suggest the opposite. After all, Safari is based on KDE, and Safari certainly does not seem to be "head and shoulders" above Konqeror KDE
IE... wtf is taking it so long if it's "integrated" as they say? It not only takes so much friggin time to load, but chews up the hard drive like they're going out of style!
It's not necessarily absolute that one will be faster than another, so each person's MMV. This is because sometimes differences elsewhere on the system can cause IE to be slower to start up. One of my systems at my old company, a fast computer, used to take over 30 seconds to open IE. Eventually I discovered why: That system had a few hundred fonts installed on it, and Internet Explorer is retarded enough to enumerate ALL THE FONTS on the system every time you open it. Deleting a lot of fonts fixed the problem. So IE was so slow to load because it sat thinking about all my fonts each time it started, even the ones it wasn't going to use. Firefox AFAIK isn't handicapped in this way. (IE wasn't the only piece of Microsoft software affected negatively by 'lots of fonts'. It's retarded, I'm not surprised graphics people tend to prefer Macs.)
Anyway, on my current Windows system (even with very few fonts) Firefox still takes quicker to open than IE, and "feels" quicker for just about everything I do, although granted that's subjective, "if it feels quicker it's still better".
Get MS DOS 6.2, it's better for you than Linux.
This is what I am
I can't make it stop
No matter how much I wanna change
I can't make it go away
My filter file looks like this for example:
I think it has been in opera since 7 but only works reliably in 7.60/8
My computer is fast enough that any browser runs acceptably fast on it. I don't have complaints about speed. This isn't DOOM 3. I care more about how well it renders pages, how stable it is, whether it protects my privacy, is full of bugs and security holes, etc. Speed is only an issue if it's too slow, and nothing really is on current hardware. Being "fastest" doesn't make a bit of difference to me.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Opera and firefox are really superior about this subject...
I'm always reading that opera is fast. I've used it on a number of platforms and I know others who have used it and its never been at all fast for us. I'm talking real world, by the clock on the wall, speed, not some hokey measurement designed to make it sound faster. If anything, it has a tendency to freeze when a number of tabs are open and there is any network activity - you can't switch tabs until its done, for instance.
While it's not quite a feature-rich as most of this. For a speed comparison, Dillo should have been in there just for a benchmark. dillo.sf.net :wq
The results show two digits after the decimal for measurements in _seconds_, taken by a human.
And I consistently run 100m in 0.00s, when measured by a 20-min sand timer.
Cheers
The fact that it doesn't matter to you has no relevance to anyone else. You are not the center of the universe.
There are people still running 300MHz systems, 1GHz systems, 2GHz systems, and 3GHz+ systems. There are people on everything from analog modems to high speed links. And they run everything from Windows 95 to whatever version of *nix came out 37 minutes ago.
And to a great many of them, speed matters. Whether it's a 30 second load vs a 15 second load, or a 1 second load vs a half second load. No, it's not the only thing, or for most people the most important thing (though it can become that). But it *is* important.
My wife hates computers. She's never had a job where she had to use one. She will sometimes do stuff on them at home, but if something feels like it's taking "too long", she's outta there. And we have several other friends like that, too.
Maybe we should all start with this.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
You didn't RTFA right?
IE6 is slightly faster than FireFox on some things, but it is pretty close, and loses out on script speed. IE5 is faster, but does less stuff (speed to render CSS is going to be less when you ignore half of it).
In any case, IE isn't close to being "head and shoulders" faster. Opera is actually faster than both on windows. It is faster than Safari on most test on the Mac too.
There are areas where closed source software is better than open source, but the browser sure as hell ain't it. Open source browsers won't be everybody's favourites, but technically they are right up their.
I doubt they had pipelineing enabled on FireFox.
These days, I take tests like these with a grain of salt. Particularly after the Gartner groups speed tests of Windows vs. Linux. They tweaked the hell out of a Windows machine, and used a stock Linux install and claimed Windows was faster.
When called on it, they conceded.
I have a feeling something similar is happening here.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
i read this article, and now I've switched to opera on linux. i previously used epiphany, and pre-previously firefox. firefox was cool, but it grabbed too much ram (i have only 128mb, of which 16mb is for the graphics card). epiphany was ok. but opera, it's in a league of its' own. loads fast. fast browsing. annoying ad banner can be corrected if you know the right websites (or can fork over some cash). it's great except for maybe extensions and stuff.
I used tcpdump to measure the average time it took for Firefox compared to IE to load a couple of pages with heavy graphic and banners.
The results all pointed to Firefox's advantage. Meaning the time it took to load the full webpage. For Firefox the average time was 1-2 seconds and for Internet Explorer the average time was 3-8 seconds for the same webpages at approximatley the same time.
These results were achived on a PC with 512 MB RAM running Windows XP SP2 and with a AMD Athlon 1700+
Interestingly the results are very different from that of the comparison in the article.
Speed does matter a lot to me, but not speed of rendering as much as startup time. Currently, Konqueror on KDE can bring up a webpage very quickly. Alt-F2, "gg:research topic" or "man:pagename", followed by return. Moments later, I'm reading it. By contrast, with Mozilla, or Firefox, I've forgotten what the hell I wanted to look up by the time they load. If you want productivity without selling out to corporations for Opera, Konqueror is the way to go, as demonstrated by these numbers.
Surely pop-ups are pretty much deprecated by now? If a webdev wants something to be read/viewed by the surfer, pop-ups are not the way to do it. Now that XP SP2 has a pop-up blocker by default, and most of the clueful are using some BHO like google toolbar to block them, anyone who wants a message conveyed via pop-up windows might as well be keeping it as secret as the payroll list at the CIA's clandestine services division.
The message now, is that pop-ups suck, have always sucked (especially if you need to use a screen-reader), and will always suck. It's time the web designers expanded their knowledge from that 6 week evening class college course and took things like this into account. These days, I can't be bothered with sites that have pop-ups at all. If a page tries to launch a pop-up and it gets blocked, well, forget it. I'll surf someplace else.
north, south, east... they all smell like bar soap.
Is it just me, or is browsing Apple's store really slow and painful in Safari, yet zippy with Firefox?
It's the same reasoning that goes behind groceries...the longer it takes you to find what you want, the more likely you'll buy something else on a whim.
Anakin Simpson: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy--ooh, donuts!
One wonders if they set the mozilla (applies to firefox as well) initialpaint delay to 0 ms. I think it defaults to 250ms (1/4 second) for their tests.
Also wonder if it would make a difference in some of the tests anyway.
To set it to 0ms add the following line to user.js:
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
Palin...
Opera and Firefox run *much faster* on Linux and Macs than IE does. I bet their only speed gains come from being integrated into the OS.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
...why firefox is considered to be so amazing.
0 /19/023 6213&tid=113
I personally greatly dislike tabbed browsing. I have tabs...on my task bar.
I could never detect a speed difference between IE or Firefox. IE crashes on me once a month at most. I've used Firefox 1.0 maybe a dosen times for it's one useful feature, is its superior javascript debugger. In those dosen times, I have had it crash on me three times.
Since SP2, I have managed to avoid spyware completely without any additional effort.
As for standards compliance, what good is standard compliance when web pages fail to shine on broken code:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/1
As for the claims of "undocumented APIs" I defy anyone to find these APIs. You can explore the externed interface of a DLL. Go ahead, find this stash of undocumented APIs.
I use IE because it works with the most pages without giving me spyware, and apparently it's faster. I have Firefox around because it is growing in popularity and I do a little bit of web development.
http://brandonbloom.name
I use firefox and k-meleon. K-meleon on my dog piss slow machines, firefox on the fast ones. my goal isn't to have the fastest possible load time, because in the end, the pages load faster than my eyes can switch from looking at the address bar to the text down below, so who cares how long it takes, if i can't percieve it? btw, on my laptop, FF loads the 6 home pages in under 8 seconds, and i bet you MOST of that time is spent fetching ulr's.
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
and you won't have a problem with popups...
The last time I posted a reply here about a Firefox article, mentioning how I didn't feel it was as fast as IE (and a couple other little reasons), and that I would stick to IE or Opera for the time being because of it, I was jumped all over by the Firefox fanboys, insulted numerous times, and got all my comments moderated down to Troll. It was really rather welcoming.
This post may get that as well (though that isn't my intention), but I hope that this study teaches some people that perhaps you should consider other peoples opinions without immediately attacking them and saying they're wrong and stupid just because you don't agree with them.
Fab of the day: Firefox.
Better: Opera.
Firefox nerds: ignore Opera.
Conclusion: grow up.
and get a girl.
Ok so I haven't read the article, but from the disclaimer, it doesn't sound like it's possible to make a fair test. What I mean, is that IE is EMBEDDED in windows. IE loads when you open windows explorer, or "My computer" or whatever else file-viewing window it's IE behind it. So there are no real "cold starts" for IE. So that's my first comment on comparing "cold starts" and "hot starts". Second, Firefox shows much more speed on a linux platform. I don't know if that's because I'm running gentoo with a bunch of USE flags to speed up and prelink on top of that, or if it's just because it's linux. Now on the other hand, there's no IE for linux (thankfully!!!). Besides, most users are concerned not about rendering pages but about connection speed and features of their browsers. Not the speed on the machine. Only at work or in a college dorm will you have a connection that could make those speeds perceptible to the user. So, next, comparing Opera to Firefox. Great. Whatever happened to the saying "don't look at gift horse in the mouth?". Opera is not free. Firefox is. Why would you compare something free with something you want a better quality from? It's fine if you want to determine whether it's worth spending the money on another browser, but then you're looking at features, not at speeds. After all, if the whole of the industry wanted lots of speed from their systems, they'd all have dual processor machines running a linux-smp enabled kernel, with blackbox only, right? So, while it may be interesting to compare the ALGORITHMS behind it all, it's not that interesting to me to compare actual speeds, because they're going to vary by environment, machine and user. Someone who has several apps open in the background will notice everything slow down a bit, when someone who only browses without popups will find it more responsive, at least for local operations. Just my $.02 worth.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
try this for porn with lynx
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
Could the point be that Opera is closed source?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
YA RIGHT.
... and instead it creates new objects. Gee, no major security threats there.
maybe when it manages not to break the document object model on very simple standard code.
Flip the visibility of an object
Basic standard tag parameters ignored, breaking the rendering of web pages. Please please sign me up!
Ya, Firefox stays to strict internet standards, but not any standard anyone else uses.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
What's the fastest Free Software browser for Free Software operating systems? Konqueror! I can't believe this is being ignored in the summary. I can't believe this is being ignored by the posters. Except for script speed, Konqueror is faster than all other Free browsers on KDE. It's faster than every other desktop's native browser!
KDE needs to trumpet this one loudly. I think that stupid suggestion to replace KHTML with Gecko just died a quick and deserving death.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Something mentioned in the summary is that these test don't take into account progressive table loading. If you figure that 90% of the websites out there use tables for layout (I totally made that up). Having the table load as the content is available instead of waiting for the entire table to load can make a huge difference. I would much rather have the entire page load in .5 a second but be able to see the majority of the page sooner.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Right, firefox is not faster than IE...
I can give a example of where FireFox is faster than IE.
When you got a 2x2 gif pixel, with two pixels which are transparent set as a background for a table. My God IE is slow.
Any simple kind of simple effects you try todo with images for maximum compatability with all browsers causes IE to run horribly slow.
Imagine what would happen when you actually do complex effects.
Another example is just dealing with transparency effects in CSS etc... IE is hell for these things.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Even if you don't do it yourself, having an easily accessible plug allows you to hire the neighbor's kid or the local shop instead of having to take the car to the manufacturer-approved dealer. There's more competition and it's cheaper in the long run.
Opera is an example of pay software that is worth it. It can compete is a market saturated with 101 free browsers, and I am so tempted to pay a license for it.
Why? Question:
What do you spend 3-5 hours a day (or 13-15 hours a day if you are reading this) doing?
Right, so why not have the best browser tool for the job?
It is not as if you cannot afford it. Yeah, OS is a very close runner up, but I say we support OS and those companies giving us the best of something, in the manner in which opera do (no spyware, a free ad supported version, cheap licenses)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
First of all his equating a 400Mhz G4 with an 800Mhz PIII is ludacris. It doesn't take into account the overhead of running panther on an older machine like that.
Secondly, the warm start should be with the app preloaded. Why? Well, the way that mac apps work isn't like windows. I load safari once, at boot. After that I just close the active window and click the safari icon to get a new one. It remains resident the whole time and creating a new window is instant. Safari is getting a bad rap for being slow to load when in the way that it's used most, there's no loading going on. IMHO, this approach to applications and documents allows a much more versatile, heavyweight framework to be linked into everything without diminishing the user experience due to launch time.
All of those tests were done on 256M of RAM and sub gigahertz machines... even a 400mhz G4 processor in the Mac side. I feel in several cases that results may've been skewed due to swapping at cold start. (The main thing that comes to mind is the MacOSX Firefox 1.0 cold start time.) I would love to see the same type of results performed on modern hardware.. 1.5GHz G4, dual 2.5GHz G5, P4/Ath64 3800, 1GB+ RAM, etc.
The application/xhtml+xml MIME-type.
The point is everyone has a bleeding edge computer with a jiga RAM and a few more jiga CPU cycles like yours.
It's beyond me why people bother to optimize their code anymore. If you need something faster, just buy more hardware with lots of jiga extras.
Like windowsupdate, the check makes it impossible to dload, say, MDAC components with anything but IE.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Wow, it displays the login while its still booting. Hooray, that's super helpful. You still have to wait for it to finish thrashing before you launch a game, and then you are back to taking just as long as win2k.
Personally I find Firefox faster than IE on many pages, simply because it doesn't download the adverts blocked by Adblock.
Andrew Yeomans
As I'd suspected from personal experience, konqueror is far faster than gecko-based browsers for everything except scripts. If you're using KDE, try it. It's really much nicer to use too, imo.
I am trolling
This got an Insightful? Cheez...
After browsing all those not-so-family-friendly websites, a person using IE will likely find that his browsing experience has slowed to a crawl after dealing with all the popups and spyware.
I work tech support, and when dealing with the spyware that IE lets through, I've had a number of calls that have gone over an hour just because the machine is responding so sluggishly. The grandparent post's point is that, thanks to spyware, even if IE starts out faster, it won't last long.
Shimatta
Be interesting to run the same suite of tests on several different specced PCs. Instead of just testing performance on an 800MHz PC test it on an 800MHz PC, a 2GHz Athlon, a 2GHz Athlon64 and a 3.2GHz Hyperthreading P4. Not to see which the fastest PC is, but rather to see whether certain browsers require more "power" to really perform well.
And if nothing else it'd be more realistic in terms of what users could expect - I know I haven't used an 800MHz PC in years :)
CSS/Edge was written by a Netscape Employee (Eric worked for Netscape back then and was head developper for Dev/Edge IIRC) to show off the new CSS capabilities in the Gecko rendering engine. It was a completely biased test case!
It is true that at that point, CSS in Netscape was superior to any other browser; IE/Mac was second, and Opera had slightly better support than IE/Windows. There were no other CSS browsers worth mentioning (Omniweb, iCab and Netscape 4 didn't cut it), and Opera's CSS support was very decent in comparison to the other browsers available at the time. The competition from Mozilla spurred development from Opera, and they have since 2002 taken the lead when it comes to CSS (AFAIK, no other browser supports the whole of CSS 2.1 - for one thing, Opera is the only browser to support counters).
Hey, CSS2 was ratified in 1998, it's 2005! The Mozilla devs should feel ashamed they are lagging behind in compliance!
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
Firefox is making me crazy. I like it, but it's not a good browser for those few of us who still use the keyboard. And it has other problems. I've checked the official bug list, and these issues are listed, but when will 1.1 come out? These are the main things that are bugging me (note that ALL of them are resolved by restoring the Firefox window, then maximizing it again): [1] Bookmarks toolbar weirdness: sometimes all the bookmarks are off-screen. [2] Keyboard not working for page navigation, form field editing, address editing, etc. [3] Right-click on page not showing correct context menu. [4] Right-click on address not showing correct context menu. [5] Single quote keypress brings up the search bar.
I understand that English is a living language, but I object to changes arising merely from repeated errors.
Well, if you had a quantum computer and your program was currently optimized for a "normal" computer, you could probably improve the efficiency by re-optimizing for the quantum one.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.