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.'"

Comments

Re:Question...

[bonch]

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.

Re:This is really interesting.

[Dirtside]

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.

As far as "cold starts," keep in mind that 90% of IE loads into memory when Windows boots up, whereas very little of (e.g.) Firefox is loaded into memory. Really just the Windows libraries that it uses are loaded; all its own stuff has to load on the spot, but IE's rendering engine and various other libraries are all automatically loaded when the OS starts. That gives IE a huge apparent speed boost as far as starting it up for the first time after you boot the computer.

Speeding up Firefox the right way

[IvyMike]

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.

TCP/IP perversion

[dustmite]

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:

• An IIS/IE exchange has fewer packets to send and less overhead when disconnecting, so artificially appears faster on stress-test benchmarks (normally a user would not feel the difference, but it makes a difference in stress-test benchmarks)
• Here's the real clincher, and this is where Microsoft's slimy brilliance shines: When an Apache server is subjected to the same stress-test of dozens or hundreds of connections per second from IE clients, because the ACK is not received, the Apache server soon ends up with hundreds of open TCP/IP sockets waiting to time out. This slows down the OS's TCP/IP handling, artificially slowing down Apache in a way that would not happen if Microsoft had used TCP/IP and not MSTCP/IP. And of course the poor Apache system is just behaving correctly according to TCP/IP.

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).

Re:TCP/IP perversion

[rs79]

You mean you don't have:

.
.
.
ExtendedStatus On
# MS hacks
DirectoryIndex home.html index.html home.htm index.htm
ACKWait MS
#ACKWait INET

?

Re:Closed Source Wins Again

[jp10558]

Could the point be that Opera is closed source?