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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 "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.
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?
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?
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...
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
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
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?
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.
Probably because the MOOX author's benchmarks for evaluating performance look at the software as a whole rather than particular uses that can be isolated and improved. Also, some of the benchmarks seem a bit fuzzy ("dragging it into the browser window and measuring its load speed"). Especially when considering a performance difference of less than 5 percent. Why not disclose what the actual numbers were too? It would certainly help us evaluate how much human error is involved in the testing process!
The other half of it is that the builds essentially just set a few compiler options to use opcodes that may not be used (SSE2?) for webbrowsing. Additionally, its possible that some of the optimizations are hurting the cache with bloated low level code. It would be interesting to see if the Intel compiler provided any stronger oomph, at a pure compile configuration level. But we don't have any Intel CPUs in the house.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
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