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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."
Guess I must be the only one here using Chrome. No other comments yet.
But seriously, the speed difference is noticeable. When I'm on my mac, I miss using it. Plugins are hard to come by, but other than that, it's great. Quick as Firefox used to be.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
You're using a non-release Chrome and yet I'm not seeing a nightly build of Safari referenced.
The Developer Preview of Safari 4.0 trounces Safari 3.1.x.
The Safari nighly builds trounce all over Safari 4.0 developer preview.
Unfortunately, speed is not everything. Chrome lacks a lot of functionality (and addons). Raw speed is nothing in this case. We aren't talking about 30 seconds difference here.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Just a quick glance:
"We tested the version of Firefox (called Minefield) that does include the V8 code"
"IE7 did not even run the test correctly and produced no final score" (along with a image of a successful run of the test, with the score "17" clearly visible)
Well, that speaks for itself. Also, terrible choice of benchmarks overall and bad methodology as usual.
Unfortunately they already won: I didn't block the ads.
I've grown so attached to some extensions I'll very soon stop even consider anything not having them.
How long till they start making browsers with a "firefox plugin compatible" feature?
...at least for me. I don't care about optimizations that allow a page to be loaded and rendered 0.1 seconds faster. The lower bound on how fast a page loads is rarely imposed by the browser anyway.
I often like to use the "Open All in Tabs" feature of Firefox, in which an arbitrarily high number of bookmarks in a folder are opened and loaded simultaneously. I can open and load 15 sites (with adblocking) in under 3 seconds. Chrome seemed to take a second to open just one tab, let alone 15.
I'm not saying I'm the normal user, but test more than the scripting engine and the rendering system before saying a browser "tops speed tests".
Insert self-referential sig here.
and what about the plugins and add-ons we used to in firefox ...
I think a long way still ahead
Most people I've ever asked "exactly what Firefox extensions do you use", give me a list of features that are either in safari or easily available through plugins. Some examples:
FireBug -- already included in the web inspector, Safari 3's is FireBug's equal, while Safari 4 DP's is massively improved.
AdBlock -- SafariAdBlock, nuf said.
Full Screen Mode -- Glims
Search in address bar -- Glims
etc.
I'm posting anonymously because even though I emphatically, categorically disagree with you, your point is an interesting one and I used my mod points accordingly. I use Adblocker, and yet I sometimes worry about losing those websites I genuinely care about; the New Yorker online, for example. On the other hand, I don't ever click through ads I see on the web, let alone purchase the products, so it's not like anyone's revenue is affected.
On a side note, I wonder, if there were a way to determine how much revenue is actually a direct result of internet advertising, would it be greater than the total cost of that advertising? I have trouble believing that the increase in sales due to Google ads comes close to rivaling Google's advertising revenue, and this has always troubled me. You might just be looking for parasites in all the wrong places.
OK, maybe it's just me, but browser speed has absolutely not been an issue since the Netscape days. I've never said, "gosh, these pages look great, but they're just being rendered too slowly!" and then abandoned a web browser. The only thing that's an issue is download speed - rendering speed is not even noticable. Is this just me? I get the feeling that the "browser speed" issue that slashdot talks so much about is like some obscure industry metric that is rather meaningless, but still gets brought up in conversation because it's a bright shiny number that people can quote when regurgitating arguments.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
No, I am not kidding. Performances is rarely where you would expect it in web application development, and this is part of what makes it so painful. Something trivial (in my sense) would take 500ms while something much more complex would run in a fraction of that time. The interdependency between all the layers (html, css, dom, js) makes it really hard to predict and measure.
Ok, you can benchmark many many things, and those guys did it, but what conclusion can you get from this ? Their words: just try multiple browsers for one app/site. That's not what I call a valuable and useful answer.
I'm not a web developer (just occassionaly only) but to that list of FireFox plugins you can add YSlow, HTML Validator, and an inline PDF reader (not external requiring full download of PDF first as 25% of what I view is PDFs).
Also, I use Firefox on Mac OSX, FreeBSD, and Windows Vista and having a consistent browser is convenient -- though the PDF readers work better on some than others.
Rod Taylor
Interesting that Chrome will now be known as the fastest browser. I never imagined that a browser that requires a gui, wastes time displaying flash animations, and runs only on the windows platform could ever be faster than my favored choice: links2. Wait, links2 is still the fastest, at least in my tests. But then I do use Firefox for YouTube and The Onion every now and then. Oh, and idle doesn't look near as horrible on links2.
How long till they start making browsers with a "firefox plugin compatible" feature?
That would be a hack-job to implement on every browser except for Firefox. An illustration of that would be the number of plugins that got bricked from V2 to V3 a few months back.
Instead, all browsers would be better off electing to support a "Unified Browser Plugin Architecture" that could itself be enabled via a native plugin that fits into existing browsers, and later be built into them.
Kinda like Java, only without the monstrous JVM.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.