Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.