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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
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
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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?
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.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
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.
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)
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
... 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.
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.
Or one could say "Firefox beats Internet Explorer in the slowness category". That should pass the Slashdot test.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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"