Chrome 4.0 Vs. Opera 10 Vs. Firefox 3.5

Jim Karter writes "In a three-way cage match, LifeHacker threw Chrome 4, Firefox 3.5, and Opera 10 into the ring and let the three browsers duke it out to see which would emerge as the fastest app for surfing the web. Quoting: 'Like all our previous speed tests, this one is unscientific, but thorough. We install the most current versions of each browser being tested — in this case, Opera 10, Chrome's development channel 4.0 version, and the final Firefox 3.5 with security fixes — in a system with a 2.0 GHz Intel Centrino Duo processor and 2GB of RAM, running Windows XP.'"

Comments

Re:Safari

[abhi_beckert]

Safari is in the test. It's just that they focused on the three new kids on the block, of which safari 4 is not among.

TFA does list results of Safari and IE, as well as other browsers, for every test in a separate graph.

Re:Versions

[nycguy]

4.0 version is in the dev channel.

Re:javascript whitelisting ?

[Kjella]

Or just use site preferences in Opera....

Re:Memory

[hattig]

Of course using Windows Process Monitor to get memory usage for a application like Chrome which has different processes per tab/plugin leads to horrendously incorrect results, which the article acknowledges in an edit, without any attempt to get the correct figures. Shame really, as this functionality is built into Chrome...

Re:Summary:

[A Friendly Troll]

Agreed on the extended functionality - I hate the 'Awesome Bar', but no other browser offers keyword searches or the ability to easily add search engines to the search box (save for IE which I dont want to use).

Start Opera. Go to a website not included by default in its search options. Right click on the search field. Choose "Create Search".

Give me something to replace 'wp rabbits' and I will dump Firefox in an instant for Chrome or Safari.

Built into Opera before Firefox had it.

"Centrino Duo Processor"

[Timosch]

Sorry guys, but Centrino is not a processor. It is a platform, specifying a certain processor, graphics chipset etc..

Fabulously useful Firefox speedup

[David Gerard]

on Unix, anyway. Exit Firefox, then do:

for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i "vacuum;" ; done

FF3.x does everything in sqlite. Some of the tables fill with crap 'cos deleted rows are marked "deleted" rather than actually being deleted and compacted. I hope future versions will run a vacuum automatically every now and then.

On this Ubuntu 9.04 box I had to apt-get install sqlite3.

Re:Fabulously useful Firefox speedup

[mindcorrosive]

Or use the Vacuum Places Improved (what kind of name is that anyway) addon from AMO:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878
Available for FF 3.5+. Labelled experimental at the moment, but works just fine. Works magic with the "awesomebar" suggestion speed: fetching suggestions has never has been so snappy.

Re:speed

[PouletFou]

You can use chromium on linux. I prefer it to firefox now because when flashplugin crashes (often on x86_64), chromium does not have to be restarted, a simple refresh works.

Re:javascript whitelisting ?

[Hal_Porter]

Site preferences in Opera is a complete pain to use.

Firstly, there's no toolbar button to bring it up, it's buried under 3 levels of menu selection.

Right click, edit site preferences. Not admittedly that I use it much.

Unintuitive graphs

[anilg]

..insignificant the discrepancies are..

Mod parent up.

The Tab loading graph (http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/17/2009/09/500x_eight_tab_load.jpg) seems to suggest Opera takes 4X, and Firefox 2X the time to load tabs than Chrome.. however, the X-axis is drawn from 6.0 to 9.0

If the Graph was rendered from 0-9, it would look like below:

Opera
================
Firefox
==============
Chrome
============

.. which shows that page loading is pretty much the same everywhere.. blowing the OMG-Chrome-loads-fast!!!! myth.