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Google Chrome Tops Browser Speed Tests
ThinSkin writes "So many Web browsers, so little time. The folks at ExtremeTech have assembled the ultimate browser test to determine which Web browser is king. From speed tests to rendering tests, different browsers traded off wins, but Google Chrome came out on top."
Is the rendering engine speed really your bottle neck when browsing? Because I would love to have that problem.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
There's some weird stuff in this "article". For example, what does it mean to "include V8 code" in a browser? Even choosing V8 as a benchmark is a mistake. Sunspider is the standard JS benchmark and it's much broader in scope.
Awarding 10 points for winning a category and then adding up the points to reach a final score is the most statistically bogus "methodology" ever.
It's nice to see SVG and canvas in benchmarks, but "IE8 will fix that compatibility issue"? Completely untrue, IE8 will not support SVG and canvas. This bit of ignorance makes me worry about the whole piece.
And as others have noted, comparing the Chrome beta against various-aged releases of other browsers makes little sense.
The speed advantage of the nightly web kits is caused not by the fact that they're newer than chrome's rendering engine, but by the fact that they don't use Google's V8 javascript engine. Instead, they use the much faster (and also more correct) SquirrelFish Extreme engine.
Actually, while not strictly "pure safari", the nightly builds of WebKit (safari's engine, including javascript engine), have a new, much faster Javascript engine called SquirrelFish Extreme, it not only beats V8 in speed (even on the heavily biased V8 benchmark), but also correctly renders Acid3, along with getting many less-corner-case parts of javascript correct.
Amen! Whatever time Firefox may lose in rendering is more than made up by features such as having a menu accessible via the keyboard, "Undo close tab", searching for text when I start typing, and extensions like Add to Search Bar, DownThemAll, Add Bookmark Here, and Uppity. Not to mention "runs in Linux"...
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Well you can use it anyway... There is a crossover version for both Mac and Linux, you can build your own version for both Mac and Linux, and there's a recent Mac build here. I'm sure there are lots of other builds available as well.