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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.'"
and here are some simple changes that you can make to Firefox to speed it up.
Obviously, since IE is faster, this is unecessary or MS has already optimized the code.
No offense, but I think you're using a lot of fancy words to tapdance around the (commonly accepted) fact that Opera is the fastest browser, followed by IE due to its native ties with the system, followed by Firefox because it reimplements all its own widgets in XUL, etc.
I really don't think there's much more to it. I use Opera on Windows specifically because it is faster and uses half the memory footprint Firefox does.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Read the page again. Later versions are slightly slower for basic HTML, but a lot faster (as in, an order of magnitude faster) for things like scripts.
Also, on Windows, Opera 8 was faster in every test than the previous versions.
You will find those patches in the nightly builds and sometimes elsewhere.
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.
Opera has done this as well for a while now, as an AC reply stated. It also has some nice treats to browse "ugly" sites, like being able to start and stop image loading on graphic intensive sites, and it can enable and disable plugins/Java/Javascript/GIF animation and sound on the fly.
Great little program.
Looking at FrontPage code for even the most simple websites, I noticed most of them are not near standards compliant. At school we had to create web pages for the teachers. We didn't have much time, so we had to use FrontPage. None of the pages work with any browser we have tested besides IE.
Scott Simontis
If people care about speeding up Firefox you can tune the internal settings to speed up rendering. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=5365 0
Who are you kidding? Frontpage makes some of the (if not the) least standards compliant markup of any WYSIWIG editor, and my guessing is that the developers only tested it with the Trident rendering engine (used by IE) and nothing else... I very much doubt that it output XHTML 1.1 STRICT & CSS 2 compliant markup ("the latest standards" you mentioned).
There's mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies within this bastard's carnival, this vicious cabaret.
...I believe the Firefox interface (especially tabs and yes I know it was Opera first(?))...
In fact, what most people don't understand, it was NetCaptor the first browser to use tabs. NetCaptor is (was) a shell for Internet Explorer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCaptor
NetCaptor wasn't the first, either. There was a third-party browser before IE hit the market with tabs; AOL bought the company and then buried the product.
It was a pretty neat product.
And once again wikipedia is wrong.
Just look at the Opera results for a moment. Notice how the later versions are actually slower.
;-)).
:-S
What? Well, some aspects, yes, but some are dramatically faster. Just look at the impressive trend of its script execution speeds. Some heavy optimizations seem to have taken place there. The cold startup time of Opera 8 is also optimized to the point it's back to the Opera 6.03 speed, which is also impressive for its vastly expanded feature set since then (rewritten rendering engine in Opera 7 among others
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?
If you're still talking about Opera, it's known to be more sensitive to bad formed HTML than IE (well duh) and even Firefox. In other words, its "quirks mode" for bad formed HTML may be a bit less tolerant. However, like the other modern web browsers out there except IE, it supports what you can expect from one. The only notable difference I can see regarding modern standards is that IE 6 and Gecko supports XSLT 1.0 but Opera doesn't. That IE 6 supports XML 1.0 and XSLT is among the more strange parts about it IMO, by the way. No no, no transparent PNG's, but advanced stuff like XSLT? Hell yes.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
So I'm outside the 100% I presume you accounted for then?
ctrl+t = new tab
ctrl+tab = switch between tabs
ctrl+shift+tab = shift between tabs backwards
ctrl+n = new window (for those few occasions when I'd want that)
alt+tab = shift between windows/programs
alt+shift+tab = shift between windows/programs backwards
tab = switch between links & form elements on a page
plus, one of my most-often used features in FF, type-to-find (just start typing to find on the page)
I may very well be a dumbshit, but I certainly know the shortcuts and use the keyboard more than I use the mouse.
As long as you don't run into the memory deallocation issue in Firefox before that. I've browsed some gallery sites in Firefox and opened a few tabs in it, and at times it reaches 200 MB+ RAM usage. Which is maintained after you've closed all tabs of course. Oh well, it's at least a documented bug. :-/ (with 232 votes, hehe...) A major reason I've went back to Opera for now. I'll take another look in Firefox 1.1. My poor 512 MB RAM system simply can't stand these symptoms.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Don't forget about:
Ctrl-PgUp: Go one tab to the left
Ctrl-PgDown: Go one tab to the right
And what do you mean about losing a whole setup just because of a browser crash, there's extensions that fix that. Much better then having the whole of explorer need to be restarted because of a browser crash.
Nephilium
Mod parent as Informative --- this is one of Firefox's best kept secrets. The optimized builds can yield a NOTICABLE performance difference in terms of startup page-loading times
For the mac users out there, links for mac-optimized firefox builds are below
G4 Optimized
G5 Optimized
I'm using the g4 build right now and it works like a charm! (Note that these are built from the nightlies, so you might get a 'bad' one. Backup your profile before installing it over an old firefox build)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
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.
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).
Don't forget about
:)
Or Alt-1, Alt-2, Alt-3, etc..
I got so used to using those on the linux console, and in gnome-terminal, I found that one by mistake.
Wow, cool; it's CTRL-1, CTRL-2, etc.. on Windows (at least for me! :-)).
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
1.01 is on the way.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Could the point be that Opera is closed source?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Opera 8 is still in beta.
In addition, due to additional features, I can see why some minor things may be slower. Opera 7 did a complete redesign, so the fact that it is slower than Opera 6 onmany things is undetstandable. But Opera 8 is already surpassing Opera 6 in a lot of the results, and it will probably only get better when the thing is actually releases.
Opera holds a slightly standards-elitist attitude compared to the other browsers out there. They don't worry quite so much about emulating IE's bugs as Firefox does.
So that might explain why it might be less "adverse-effects resistant", though I'm not sure how you gauged that. (Opera 7 certainly seems more accepting of HTML/CSS bugs than 6; I haven't really used 8 - I'll wait for the release).
I was going to moderate in this story, but I had to reply to this comment...
One person's bug is another person's feature. If a site does not work correctly with Opera, most people either have the capability of using another browser, or they can set Opera to render all pages, or they don't care enough about these instances to bother.
I have to agree with previous posters. Opera has saved me countless hours over the years in not needing to re-render pages. It would be hard for me to enumerate all of the times where the non-rendering of the browser is extraordinarily helpful or timesaving. If I'm on a page where I would actually want to force Opera to re-render it when I hit the back button (I can't think of a single instance I'd want to though), Opera can be set to do so.
Out of curiosity, what pages does Opera's back button break? I've never run across one. I'd be interested to know.
> The only reason I use Firefox (and I use it a
.you just have to write a proxy.pac (pac = proxy auto-config). It is a javascript file that points your browser to the proper proxy server depending on the request.
/ de mo/proxy-live.html
> lot) is that I can't split proxy servers in
> Opera.
Sure you can. .
For reference:
http://wp.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes
> The best best best part about Opera is that it doesn't check with the server when you hit the back button!!!
If you control the squid proxy that you use then add:
to squid.conf, it strips the no-caching headers and Gecko doesn't try to fetch the page again when going back.
It goes against the HTTP spec but cache control headers are overused anyway.
I have a dual boot 400Mhz machine and Firefox is unusable in Windows and Linux. It takes about a second for dropdowns on forms to appear even if they have only a few entries. Everything else is about the same scale. Opera flies along and IE's many problems are not speed related.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"