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."

Comments

Not a suprise to anyone who has tried Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

But speed isn't everything. The moment Chrome lets me use the 17 extensions I have to firefox and is still the fastest, I applaud. Currently I couldn't even consider having to lose all the extensions that help web development and surfing...

This thing should be clear to everyone by now.

Use Chrome if you want speed, Firefox if you want extensions, IE if you just want to annoy the hell out of all us Firefox fanboys, Opera if you want a ready package of speed and features, etc...

Re:Not a suprise to anyone who has tried Chrome

[polar red]

And if you want 1 site to be able to use javascript, but you wouldn't allow another site to use it unless hell froze over ?

Interesting, but nothing really new

[Bearhouse]

Summary: IE is crap, Safari has some issues, Opera most compatible with Acid 3, Firefox is OK and Chrome is fast but not finished.

So, a stripped-down browser is fast. Wow.

In the real world, I'll be sticking with Firefox, with Ad blockers, Greasemnkey etc.

Re:Interesting, but nothing really new

[Bearhouse]

You are a leech on the rest of society

Because I use ad-blockers? How about people who use TIVO? I have no problem paying for stuff, and contribute to free projects, donate to Wikipedia etc. Just because I sometimes want a less-intrusive browsing experience does not make me a leech. And who gives a shit about karma anyway?

Re:Interesting, but nothing really new

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to receive an ad, I have to actually request the ad (part of how HTTP works). Sure, my browser's default behavior is to request all images/flash/etc, but I can easily instruct it not to.

Re:Interesting, but nothing really new

[Atti K.]

Using ad-blocker is simply stealing. And yes I do call it stealing because you are incurring a cost on the content provider without compensating them. Its no different from stealing at a store with poor security.

So, is using links/lynx/w3m stealing too? Is turning off images in Firefox and not installing flash stealing too?

Re:Interesting, but nothing really new

[TuringTest]

I never ever have bought a product found through an advert. So I'm actually costing less to the chain of advertising than if I actually downloaded their ads (ok, but more than if I never visited their sites).

Do you really think they'd be better off if I have actually seen their ads but never acted on them? That would imply being a leech to the people who paid for the ads, isn't it? How is adblock different?

Re:Safari? Safari what?

[rawg]

Yeah, I use the Webkit nightly builds. Webkit runs circles around everything else, plus it renders the Acid 3 test 100%. Yet reviewers will review beta/alpha browsers and leave Webkit out.

I'll give up a few milliseconds.

[Beelzebud]

I'll give up a few milliseconds for Firefox's features...

Why IE7 and not IE8?

[Numen]

Chrome is the current browser beta from Google, and IE8 is the current browser beta from MS... so why compare Chrome in the same group as IE7?

Why not Konqueror?

[Karellen]

Why does no-one include Konqueror in these tests? It's even available for Windows these days.

Re:Why not Konqueror?

[bcmm]

Don't be stupid.

Konqueror sucks. On most of the sites I visit, it doesn't render the page properly

In KDE 4, Konqueror uses effectively the same rendering engine as Safari, and I for one have not been encountering many rendering errors. Which sites misrender for you?

For that matter, Even Firefox 3.0.3 continuously crashes on my Fedora Core 9 installation.

The majority of the Firefox codebase is cross-platform. If it crashes on Linux, you can bet it'll crash on Windows too, under similar circumstances*. In my experience, it is equally (un)stable on both platforms.

I use Konqueror for most things due to it's speed, and Firefox when I have to use Windows, and for the occasional sites which insist on specific browsers or use broken flash-detection scripts (why must sites try to decide whether you can have flash content instead of just sending you the tag and seeing what you do with it)?

* Barring buggy plugins, that is. For me, Quicktime causes more crashes than any plugins on Linux.

How come the only beta browser tested was Chrome?

[rklrkl]

It's quite dubious that the only beta browser tested was Chrome, especially when most of the others have publicly available beta versions available for testing. Yes, I understand that the *only* release of Chrome is a beta, but then either Chrome should be disqualified from testing since it's not a final release or other browsers' beta releases should be allowed into the test (why not include both a final and beta release of those in that case, so we can see if there are improvements in the beta?).

I'd also like to see tests on non-Windows platforms as well, although Chrome scores as badly as IE here - it's *only* available on Windows at the moment and there's been a vague promise of ports to Mac and Linux, but these seem to be predictably dragging on and on.

Rigged?

[Wingsy]

Is it fair for them to run these tests on different machines? If you'll notice, Safari was run on an obsolete Mac Mini, a relatively slow single core laptop in a desktop box. Some poster there had run his own tests with the browsers in question, all on the same machine and he got different results -- Safari was fastest. I think they should have also tested Safari on a standard issue Mac, like a current iMac.