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

Safari

[rallymatte]

It would have been interesting to see Safari in this test as well.

Re:Safari

[foniksonik]

I think the parent's point is that the 64 bit version of Safari is ~10 days old. Being 64 bit should qualify it as a *new* version over the 32 bit version previously available in pretty much any review process.

Versions

[Fri13]

Google Chrome 4.0? I just one hour ago upgraded to latest Google Chrome beta of coming 3.0 version from Google labs. (3.0.195.10). If 3.0 has not come yet out, how can they test 4.0?

Re:Versions

[Barny]

So they compare the current, stable release of firefox against dev builds of other browsers?

And as others are saying, the fastest way to render a page that has a ton of scripting is of course firefox + noscript.

Memory

[NoYob]

I made a bee line to the memory tests and based on my browsing habits, Firefox is the winner.

Re:Memory

[sopssa]

One thing these tests don't take into account is the UI responsiveness, in which Opera really owns the other browsers - everything just seems fast and responsive. Chrome isn't that far, but you can still see how things like opening new tabs takes some time and isn't "instant". Firefox is also behind on UI responsiveness, and I probably dont have to mention IE (3-5 secs to open new tab, seriously?).

This is what MS tried to improve in Win7 too. Even if its not really faster technically but just feels so, it improves usability a lot.

Re:Memory

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

IE 8's multiprocess architecture hurt its tab opening responsiveness. Most of the plugins apparently have to be reloaded for each tab and some of them take forever. I discovered that if I turned off some stuff like Macfee scriptproxy and Java SSV helper, I could make new tabs open .5 sec. Still, if Chrome can do it fast, I have no clue why IE 8 can't do just as well.

Re:Memory

[BrokenHalo]

Speed isn't the only important criterion.

Empirical evidence appears to show that Firefox is not always the fastest browser around. However, it offers a comprehensive and mature set of add-ons or extensions that make it almost indispensable for people like me. Not that I use so many (Zotero, Adblock, Flashblock, Better Privacy, Page Saver), but just enough to make me reluctant to change.

In the past, my choice of browser used to revolve around whether my bookmarks were easily importable. But over the last few years, I have tended to go straight to Google, and I no longer have any idea how useful my bookmarks file really is.

Raw speed is probably a moot point....

[gadget junkie]

Having read the article, I found two things particularly interesting:

1. the author did not put any version of MS internet explorer in the Arena. Now that's understandable, all windows system come with IE installed, so the rationale, as I see it , is that there's no point in benchmarking a program that no one has to choose on its own. I only wonder what will happen if Europe goes forward in forcing MS to sell OEM copies of Win7 without IE installed.

2. the whole "speed" thingy is rather moot in my view. I've been using Firefox for some time now, and I DO appreciate the fact that fewer resources are used, even at the expense of a couple of seconds of starting and/or loading time. After all, it's not a multiplayer game where milliseconds seem to count.

Re:Summary:

[Erik Hensema]

What debacle are you refering to? The awesome bar is fast and useful. I rarely click bookmarks these days, I just type the name in the location bar and it will pop up soon enough. It's possible to search through pages titles instead of urls. It's never failed me. So what debacle?

Re:Summary:

[d3ac0n]

You can't disable it - thats the debacle. A lot of people don't like it, but the Firefox devs have essentially told us to shut up and live with it.

Pretty much.

Although at least you can disable some of the more annoying aspects of it via Tools - Options in 3.5.x. Basically, I jumped from 2.20.x to 3.5.x after getting frustrated with 3.0.x and deciding to stick with the 2.20.x version for a good long while.

While I don't think we will ever get the proper revert to the 2.x style URL bar that SHOULD happen, as long as we can easily disable the crap parts of the Awful Bar without having to dig in about:config I'm satisfied.

Firefox is unstable.

[Futurepower(R)]

The results about memory use were nonsense, as now mentioned in a revised version of the article.

Also, Firefox has bugs in its event handling, apparently. If you open a large number of Window and tabs, and keep opening and closing tabs over a period of hours, eventually Firefox will crash. Firefox has had that problem for many years.

Firefox also apparently has problems with its cache handling, apparently. For example, here is a comment to the Lifehacker.com story referenced in the Slashdot summary:

"Firefox 3.5 seems to get slower for me over time. It was really crawling the other day so I got the latest chrome and it seems blazing fast.

"I'll have to try some of the tricks to clean up FF. I'm sad to see it falling behind in speed because I like so many FF features."

If Chrome ever gets the necessary add-ons, such as AdBlock Plus, I'm guessing that people will abandon Firefox. There seems to be no hope that Mozilla Foundation will ever be managed well.

(I like seeing ads, I just don't like flashing, moving ads. "Marketing" people are amazingly ignorant, in my experience; they often don't realize that annoying people is not a good way to get customers.)

Re:Firefox is unstable.

[metamatic]

If Chrome ever gets the necessary add-ons, such as AdBlock Plus, I'm guessing that people will abandon Firefox.

Yes. I'm sick of Firefox's crashing and periodically hanging for 30 seconds while it garbage collects or something.

I'm willing to switch to the first browser that gives me the equivalent of Firefox + CS Lite + NoScript + AdBlock. Personally, I'd have thought that a simple UI for allowing the current site to use cookies and scripts would be a basic feature of any browser, but it seems the browser makers are more interested in not annoying site owners who want to track users and show them ads.

Re:speed

[TheLink]

I'm more concerned with availability, stability, security and the ability to fail gracefully.

When firefox crashes - everything goes poof. Worse, firefox does NOT let me launch separate firefox processes to workaround that stupidity. It is ironic that I can run separate instances of IE but I can't do that with firefox - an application that should be more "unixy" than IE.

When I tried Google Chrome on Win XP, it did not allow me to launch it as a different user. I prefer to run my browsers using different users - e.g. login as User A, but launch the browser as User B. That way it's a lot harder for the browser as User B to touch my User A stuff. The OS has to be exploited too.

Re:Fabulously useful Firefox speedup

[David Gerard]

Yep! Until someone suggested this (compacting the tables), I'd assumed the only way to fix this was to delete my profile. An extension is a good place to put it, with a view to it going into the base.

My own anecdotal rating

[Ralph Spoilsport]

on a MacBookPro...

FF 3.5 is a crashy mess. I have NO plug ins. It regularly refuses to render a page. I click try again and BANG, it renders. I'm pretty sick of FF doing that. It also crashes a lot.

Opera works fine - its quick and has never crashed. I don't care for the UI much. It has a built in Torrent client, so I like using it in te background sometimes.

Chromes is not on the mac. Boo.

Camino is also lightweight but not super snappy, and sometimes things render completely wrong and ugly.

Safari sucks hairy donkey balls.

So, as a consequence, I tend to run FF or Camino. If Chrome was on the Mac, I'd certainly give it a solid run. I am very serious about FF's screw ups. It's very disappointing.

Re:How incredibly important!

[Hurricane78]

Let' *again* calculate why your browser "hogs" half a gig of RAM:

How many tabs do you need for that? Well, Let's say your average tab has 4 pages. With 1660x950 pixels (without the window borders & co) in uncompressed (what you need in memory) full color they are coming to 18 MB. Now add the uncompessed source files in the cache, the DOM/parse tree, the JavaScript instance, and the other tab object data, at, let's stay low and say 2-10 MB. And we get to 20-30 MB. Then add Flash (which is leaking all over the place itself) for another couple of MB per tab.

Now we're getting to 25-17 tabs, when leaving out the Flash.

So how many tabs do you have open usually? Does it fit?

What do we learn: Don't expect that because the page, stored on disk, is only a couple of kilobytes, that it won't take up much RAM or CPU. After all it's highly compressed!