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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.'"
...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
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.
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
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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.
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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?
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.
You mean, way to go KDE, thanks Apple for contributing. Konqueror is not half bad, even if it's scripting speed is poor, as confirmed by the article.
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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
The actual MS Internet Explorer was not tested :(
I am talking about the one loaded with spyware and viruses.
... 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.
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...
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
lynx...is there anything it can't do?
Render the tables in TFA correctly, re-sort the tables, etc.
Aside from its incredible speed, though, the best reason to use lynx is that you can keep it open in a little window on your desktop with nothing but text showing. Their motto should be "Lynx: It Looks Like You're Working!"
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
"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."
:-)
Nice try, but how does that explain IE being faster than FireFox under MacOS X as well in some areas?
Of course, Safari kicks them both
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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?
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."
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.
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.
Nice try, but how does that explain IE being faster than FireFox under MacOS X as well in some areas?
Well, when you don't support entire chunks of the language you can be faster.
Speed tests mean nothing if the browsers don't render the results properly.
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 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).Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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.
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.
IMHO:
i use opera for many reasons, but one of them is because it handles many tabs open very nicely. i typically have 20-30+ tabs open at any given time, some with tons of graphics some with huge amounts of text. it is partially because of the way i work (sort of ADD i guess) and partially because i can organize the work i'm doing visually by moving tabs around.
no other browser handles that many windows as deftly as opera. i start getting nervous about ie crashing after about 10 windows. firefox bogs down immensely after about 10 tabs and becomes very difficult/annoying to work with at about 20. mozilla is even worse and becomes very sluggish much sooner than firefox.
i expect a lot of performance out of a browser and i both can't and won't change my requirements or browsing habits due to a program that doesn't work the way i want it to.
that said, i think firefox is a great program but it doesn't work the way i work and therefore i don't use it nearly as often as i do opera...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
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!