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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.
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...
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.
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.
That's just the rendering engine they're testing. My browser is called "AdBlock".
Nonsense. I'm using Firefox.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...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
I'll give up a few milliseconds for Firefox's features...
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.
Till it's got adblock, I don't care if it renders pages before they exist. I don't care if it makes me breakfast or does my laundry. In short, without adblock, it ain't S**T.
-=sig=-
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?
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!
Why does no-one include Konqueror in these tests? It's even available for Windows these days.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
How is it that Opera beats Firefox in all but one test (SVG and Canvas) and beats it in the ACID3 and yet still gets placed 3rd? And then he says (despite it getting the highest ACID3 score) that both Opera and IE7 have compatibility issues? WTF?
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.
They didn't test w3m!
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.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Let it be known now and henceforth, Google Chrome IS THE ONLY BROWSER USING V8. Safari's new stuff is SquirrelFish and Mozilla's is TraceMonkey.
Please know this before you write an article making yourself look foolish.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
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.
A more viable option (in the Slashdot case) is to subcsribe if you don't like the ads and wish to better the site.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Very few FF3.0 plugins will work on 3.1beta.
Actually, most of them will, if you install the Nightly Tester Tools add-on. You can then force compatibility on any or all of your add-ons.
YMMV, but in my case, the following work fine in 3.1 beta 1: iMacros, Adblock Plus, DownloadHelper, Firebug, Flashgot, Foxmarks, and Web Developer Toolbar.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
For me, the clearest sign that this article represents technically incompetent me-too "journalism" was made abundantly clear when they said-
`Obviously, Chrome includes the V8 code and the other browsers do not. We tested the version of Firefox (called Minefield) that does include the V8 code and listed those results below our "official" findings.'
Minefield doesn't include "V8". They mean "JavaScript JITing", I'm going to presume, but chose a terribly inept way of saying it. It's also a bit embarrassing when they decide to fluff up an article with idolizing -- Lars Bak and his team didn't invent this.
Then again I knew something was wrong in the preceding sentence where they said that V8 radically improves the JavaScript "load time".
You don't seriously develop in a browser do you other than for testing purposes??
You've obviously never used them...
Granted, I don't actually use 17, I probably don't even use 10, but the ones I use are pretty essential. Firebug is a large part of it -- it means I can see exactly which files are loading from where (and how long they're taking). It means I can see exactly what the DOM tree looks like, and which styles are being applied where, and from what CSS classes. It means I can then edit said CSS inline to see what it looks like -- no more guessing pixel values, I just use the arrow keys to position something, then copy that value into the actual CSS file.
The Javascript is pretty good, too -- I get a nice console I can type arbitrary code into, I can keep a log, set breakpoints, etc... In so many ways, Firebug brings modern software development tools to the Web.
Then there's the Web Developer toolbar, which adds an absurd number of tools -- the ability to temporarily disable CSS or JavaScript, for example. It's also nice to know whether a page was rendered in "standards mode" or "quirks mode", and there's even an extension (which I haven't needed) to run an actual validator against that page.
Then there's Firecookie -- cookie support for Firebug. Easy access to which cookies are being used on this page, and console logs of exactly when they were modified, and to which values, and by which script.
None of them are necessary, but there's no way I'm giving up Firebug.
As for surfing - the only extension i have is flash
Flash isn't an extension, it's a plugin. Not that there's a lot of difference.
and Ive yet to find a page I couldn't surf
That's not the whole of it.
For example, I missed a feature of Konqueror -- ctrl+m to hide the menubar. Most of the time, you don't need it, so why leave it there taking up space? So I got a Firefox extension to hide the menubar, and show it when I press alt.
I'm sure with heavier Firefox users, stupid little extensions like that account for most of it.
Then there's the really powerful ones, like Greasemonkey. I can write a bit of Javascript that will run on a given page -- or on a given set of pages, or on every page. If you know anything about Javascript, sit back and think about how powerful that could be. All kinds of things you'd think you need extensions for become simple scripts that anyone can understand.
Simple, stupid example: Suppose you don't like the "parent" link in this comment. You could write a script to remove it. Something fancier -- maybe add a mouseover "tooltip"-like effect for usernames and userids on Slashdot, which fetches the user's profile via AJAX, and shows you just the bio.
Basically, Greasemonkey makes it possible for a competent web developer to get rid of just about any annoyance from just about any page -- or add features, or just customize it (want Slashdot to have a blinking red background?) -- with a few lines of Javascript.
It's a gateway drug -- there's already one site I won't visit outside of Firefox, because of the script I've written for it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!