Slashdot Mirror
Web Browser Grand Prix
An anonymous reader writes "After seeing Opera's claim to 'Fastest Browser on Earth' after their most recent release, Tom's Hardware put Apple Safari 4.04, Google Chrome 4.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, and Opera 10.50 through a gauntlet of speed tests and time trials to find out which Web browser is truly the fastest. How does your favorite land in the rankings?"
Really, it would.
The site is Slashdotted so hard, the link was removed from the summary to give the poor guys a break.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html
It doesn't even have a link to the article.
I really like to use Internet Explorer 3, I hope they tested it.
I'm sure the loading times of all browsers would be faster if the "article" wasn't spread over 11 damn pages ...
Perhaps they could run comparative tests on ad-blocked and flash-blocked vs vanilla spam versions ?
And am I the only one who finds it fucking cynical in the extreme, to force you to surrender your email address just so you can use the printable version and skip the advertising crud ?
"After seeing Opera's claim to 'Fastest Browser on Earth' after their most recent release, Tom's Hardware put Apple Safari 4.04, Google Chrome 4.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, and Opera 10.50 through a gauntlet of speed tests and time trials to find out which Web browser is truly the fastest. How does your favorite land in the rankings?"
I use Lynx you insensitive clod!
A text-based web browser like Lynx is still faster than any graphical-based web browser.
analysis and conclusions
I just installed Opera 10.5 and it's decently good enough for me to continue using it .
For whatever reason, Microsoft's browser loads the Facebook homepage with extreme haste. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera take second, third, and fourth (respectively). Safari takes almost twice as long as the second-place finisher Firefox, and more than four times as long as IE.
Probably because Facebook cuts out a lot of the functionality that IE wouldn’t support anyway?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Sure, Chrome is relatively faster than Opera, which is relatively faster than Firefox, which is relatively faster that IE.
That still doesn't change the fact that, in absolute terms, they're all horribly slow for the comparatively simple tasks that they do. And we know exactly what the problem is: JavaScript.
JavaScript is a hack. Nothing more, nothing less. It was originally meant to allow simple event handling. Unfortunately, some people took it seriously, and now it has become a "first-class" programming language, although in every single way it just plain shouldn't be.
Life would be so much better if we had better-designed and better-implemented languages available in the browser. It's not like we don't already have them; we do! Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, Lua, and Scheme are just a few.
We just need Google, Apple, Opera and Mozilla to realize that JavaScript needs to go. Together they can make any one of those aforementioned scripting languages widely supported. Browser performance will skyrocket, developing client-side web applications will become much more tolerable, and most importantly, nobody will have any reason to use JavaScript.
Look, check for noscript and ask nicely to turn it off. If you have all your stuff on one page, I will turn adblock off.
I was mildly interested in this because I had compared a lot of different browsers once and was interested to see how another site would do it.
Then I see the usual multipage shit, a quick glance at noscript and adblock were slightly reassuring despite the bullshit ad displayed on the side for windows 7/vista whatever.
So there's a print button, good enough. I click on it and it fucking wants me to subscribe. FUCK THAT MULTIPAGE SHIT.
Goddamn it, I close all these websites once I realise the shit they're pulling. Y'know what? Autopager shouldn't be used on these sites till you're sure you are blocking all their ads. Perhaps throw in an option to download all the images over and over to use their bandwidth while you click forward twenty times.
Fucking ban all stories with main links like these. Don't need that shit, they don't need the traffic if they're going to annoy the shit out of me *cough* I mean, 'people' like this.
Look, check for noscript and ask nicely to turn it off. If you have all your stuff on one page, I will turn adblock off. Hell I should put that at the top. Annoy the shit out of me and the site gets ignored and ad-block/noscript gets new rules to block your stupid shit.
Lynx is for newbies. Real men telnet to port 80 and type in the HTTP headers manually, then parse the response in their minds.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It's not so much the browser as it is the renderer, and, well, Safari and Chrome are naturally close because they are both using WebKit.
And WebKit is the best and fastest renderer in the world.
...block all ads with Privoxy and shut off Javacrap.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I use a telnet in a terminal. Right now, it's going to be a bitch posting this comment:
First try:
telnet http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/05/1544218/Web-Browser-Grand-Prix?art_pos=1:80 ..... how the fuck do I "click" on the "preview' button?? Shit! OK...
Fuck it. Where's Lynx./..
I don't care how many research monkeys on cocaine say otherwise, I'm sticking with Firefox!
The competition will even make every browser better & faster.
Mine being IE6. Now, the question remains. Will this comment be moderated as...
Troll,
Funny,
or something else?
I guess it depends on whether you think someone would be stupid enough to be using IE6 still. cough
Can we please stop measuring browser speed with javascript? Javascript is shit 99% of the time.
And before you get any ideas, flash is shit 99.9% of the time.
How about browser makers focus on making popular sites suck less ass? Imagine if IE9/FF4 came with official mods for sites. Load facebook.com? Get it without the bullshit!
You can obviously already do this with great control with plugins for various browsers, but for it to make any difference for the average user it has to be built in, officially supported, and transparent.
If facebook doesn't like it, fine, let them get into an arms race with the browsers, just like how advertisers are starting to fight back against adblockers (who are also fighting back).
I'm sick of the shitty shitty shit on the web.
Measuring how fast a browser can wade through that shit is pointless. How about you measure how well a browser power washes that shit off of the site before serving it up to me?
IGN.com as viewed by
- Default IE8 reference
- IE9's shitripper
- FF4's shitripper
- FF3.6 + ABP + NS
- Chrome 2's shitripper
- etc.
That's a comparison I'd like to see. And if that comparison got attention, maybe, just maybe, sites would be designed with less shit.
Besides the obligatory browser code, Safari on Windows uses a lot of libraries that only get used by Safari - CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics, CFNetwork, the Objective-C runtime, and its own GUI (a limited Win32 port of Cocoa?). It also uses libraries that could be shared and/or duplicate builtin Windows functionality - such as sqlite3, zlib, libxml2, libxslt, and pthreads. (I imagine it uses its own SSL implementation too.)
The IE startup time seems higher than it should, because it uses the most Win32 functionality. It uses threading, SSL, XML, etc. from Win32.
How does your favorite land in the rankings?
If it's your favorite browser, what does it matter how fast it is?
...was won by Firefox, according to the summary at the end. Isn't that what the average user cares most about? How fast a page loads?
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
The American contenders turned up
Firefox may not be the fastest, but with its builtin function plus rich array of addons, it's the most useful.
Only one browser in the list has adblock/noscript/flashblock.
Without those the other browsers are automatically losers no matter how fast they start up.
No sig today...
As always, Firefox ate much less memory than competitors...specially against opera & chrome.
I care about things like responsiveness. How long does it take to redisplay after switching tabs or adjusting zoom? Is the UI still responsive when another tab/window is busy? Are scrolling and window resizing smooth? Will the browser respond well if the internet connection is lost / the system wakes up from sleep, when using AJAX applications like Gmail/Google Reader? (I had problems with one browser behaving badly with Gmail/Google Reader if the pages were open before entering sleep mode.) Will the browser perform well over RDP, VNC, or NX?
Start-up time isn't very significant - I generally leave browsers running all the time. Memory usage isn't very significant unless the system is low on memory. Otherwise, I prefer that the browser uses as much memory as it can to cache things. Rendering/script delays are not noticeable on modern systems.
They included how well they ranked in the acid test, but most of the article was about raw speed. But for "best" there are more criteria to take into account. Features, availability of extensions (specially the ones you in particular need), OSs where it runs, security, matters at the moment of making a choice. But at least is a good clue that opera and chrome are usually the fastest ones, safari and firefox aren't so far, and IE is the worst choice is speed is an important factor.
The main debatable test was the specific sites benchmarks one, as it could had measured in good part how much tuned for specific browsers are those sites, but if are the kind of sites you visit more, probably could notice the difference (at least, until that sites acknowledge that worth optimizing for webkit or gecko too).
Non graphical web browsers, like Lynx will always be the fastest. Although the content is a little "slim", it loads pages faster.
IE did best or near best in the web browsing events most users will care about - page load time sfor popular sites like yahoo, facebook, or youtube.
So how does a web browser that apparently sucks at so many theoretical benchmarks, crush the competition in real world load times? Apparently it doesn't matter what you do, if major websites tailor themselves to you.
google ripped off simon for its chrome icon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game)
whenever i see that chrome icon, i want to start pressing the panels before i forget the sequence
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unfortunately, the memory usage benchmarks seem very VERY far from "real world". 1, 5 and 10 tabs? Right now I have ~40 open in Firefox, and that might well climb to 70 or 80. Firefox handles this just fine.
Chrome unfortunately chews up 30Mb or so *per tab* - presumably the downside of the process separation. I find Chrome brilliant if you want to quickly go online and look something up, and I use it now and then for this kind of thing.
But my *real* browser - the one I always have open, the one containing all the pages I'm working on, the references I'm coding from, the news sites I plan to read at lunch later, and so on - will stay as Firefox. Chrome just dies under the load, certainly with "only" 4Gb of RAM.
Aside from that, the superior customisation options of Firefox would win it for me, though Chrome is certainly improving in this area.
You are misinformed, I presume you are refering to Firefox, however Chrome and IE both have extensions to do roughly the same thing.
Just because you aren't aware of things outside your viewport of the universe doesn't mean they don't exist.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
How do these numbers help me choose a browser ? When on any test - speed or memory - most browsers performed differently on different benchmarks from the same category ? I wish they also explained whether being second in a particular memory test is that bad. Besides, I use a lot of extensions in Mozilla that blocks flash, adblocks etc, how do those affect memory consumption and speed ? I wish there was some more details about these results, especially how the numbers translate to daily use.
I really like Chrome, and according to Tom's numbers it would probably provide a superior browsing experience, aesthetics aside. Yet, I can't make the switch.
I'm addicted to mouse gestures for all my surfing. I switched to Opera way back when, solely for the gestures, and liked it so much I even sent them $20 (paying for a browser!). I switched to Firefox when I learned about the 'All-in-One Gestures' add on.
I'd really like to switch to Chrome, but simply cannot until I find a way to deal with my deep seated gesturing habit. Right-clicking, or moving the mouse arrow to the top left of the screen both seem tedious (which feels really lazy to say), when all I want to do is go back or open a link in a new tab.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
Do tell. Since I've never found a per-site whitelister like NoScript on anything else.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
On the whole, there's really a single practical conclusion from those tests that is useful to a user:
Any browser is fast enough, so long as it's not IE.
... wget.
Real geeks read straight html.
Have gnu, will travel.
Once again, calculating Chrome's memory usage is not as simple as summing the memory usage of all its processes, because shared libraries are only loaded once. It's unclear as to whether these benchmarks took this into account. More info here.
It still has a lot of compatibility issues. Sites like Youtube, ESPN and others still have bugs in formating and video playback with Flash. I love the speed and it's my primary browser at this point, but if the bugs aren't fixed and a better ad-block isn't added soon, I will be disappointed.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
I was trying to read the article with Chrome, the eventual winner, and these incredibly annoying ads took up a big chunk of the top left corner. This is with the AdBlock extension for Chrome. The ad was bad enough that it covered several words of the first sentences on each page. I thought that a nice experiment would be to load the page on Firefox. Hey, whadyaknow, the annoying ad is gone in Firefox. To me that says Firefox won the two most important categories. Mem usage and getting rid of annoying ads.
Is he strong? Listen bud, He's got radioactive blood.
For very rough values of “roughly the same”.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Firefox is quite a bit faster than default on most sites with these enabled. I can't stand being without them, so I don't care what the other browsers do.
Really, all the other browsers are good.
Rough comparison:
Now all we need is for MS to build a browser.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'll admit I'm a bit crazy, but I'm still not comfortable installing anything from google on my machine. Their services are great, but they need to stay up in the cloud and away from my stuff.
Opera's got it built in!
Preferences - Advanced - Content. Disable Javascript there.
Visit a site you want whitelisted? Right click - Edit site preferences - Scripting - Enable Javascript.
Easy!
I can't help to find the testing biased. With lovely tidbits like...
"After reviewing the JavaScript benchmarks, we've decided that Tom's has no choice but to run all of them in the future. While I personally lean toward JSBenchmark, since it isn't affiliated with any browser, its results don't reflect the outcome in Dromaeo. Until the reason for Opera's devastating Mozilla score can be explained, I believe we'll have to run all of them to get the clearest picture. If you disagree, or have an opinion on a better way to benchmark JavaScript, sound off in the comments section below."
Or the conclusions, where out out of 13 categories, Safari won 3, Opera 4, Chrome 3, Firefox 3 and IE only one (shared with FF). Yet, they proclaimed Chrome as the winner. Lovely.
Yes, i'm an Opera fan, but i also like Firefox and Chrome a lot. I'd just like to read fair reviews.
At least I can see my dick, Neil.
-- Rob
Chrome: 88
Opera: 83
Safari: 83
Firefox: 74
IE: 51
(Scores calculated by using chart on last page)
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
But only when I avoid Microsoft-centric sites and sites that try to load insecure scripts.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic...but if you aren't, the good part of noscript is the ability to block all the javascript that is tracking/adds while allowing the script that allows forms to be filled out and videos to play.
If you look at the results, they are all pretty similar, except IE. While Opera and Chrome barely win a few more times than Safari and Firefox, the reality is that the results are all largely similar and no one product really is much different than the others in performance. If the tests were weighted differently, or if the analysis used standard deviation instead of place, you'd find no real difference in any of these, again, except IE, which clearly did not fare well in these tests. Just my 2 cents--I don't hate any of them and even IE has people that like it, despite the fact that it is slower.
Your right. Opera winds hands down... Oh? You where talking about a plug in that is only supported by Firefox and not built-in? Then all of them support t don't they? Or does Safari not have plug-ins?
Internet Explorer is fastest only on Facebook and Yahoo!'s websites (both very popular websites and partners of Microsoft)? This is probably just a coincidence, but I've heard rumors before of MS inserting special code for, say, the Acid3 Test. Probably just paranoia ...
I heard Chrome got a anti-javascript doodlely only recently, so I'm not exactly wrong in assuming they are lagging when compared to Firefox.
And by "real" functionality, I mean full support for open standards for video & audio w/o Flash, support for really large long term sessions (dozens of windows, hundreds of tabs, running for weeks) without consuming all the CPU (which Mozilla based browsers tend to do) or memory (which Chrome tends to do) on your machine, robust Javascript, Flash and Ad blocking (to prevent outsiders from using your computer as part of the cloud for their own purposes) and most of all "Green-ness" -- do long running browser sessions, particularly large ones, effectively "degrade" all of the tabs, windows and Javascripts (which have no "current" use because nobody is actually *looking* at them) so their CPU use is minimized and they are paged out? [Thus allowing ones OS to minimize power & memory use and hopefully minimize any data transmission charges (for browsers being used over 3G/4G networks)).
And for the people who don't understand the emphasis in retaining large sessions, you have probably never tried to restart a large session (which can take 10+ minutes of maxed DSL bandwidth and 15-20 minutes of maxed CPU time -- the browser being largely unresponsive during that period). You may have also have never tried to restart an old session only to find that the pages in which you were interested no longer existed. (Yes there are ways around these problems but they require plugins and/or large personal save page storage areas.
My current favourite is rekonq (http://rekonq.sourceforge.net/), a KDE-native WebKit-based browser. The version I'm compiling from git (they're releasing 0.4.0 soon and it's shaping up well) is looking very nice indeed. If you have the dependencies it needs (recent version of QT needed for plugin support. I'm running with QT 4.6 and KDE 4.4) it's very nice. KDE's web shortcuts work, integrates with KGet, Click To Flash built in, slim UI. I've got nspluginwrapper on this system (my 64-bit Fedora installed it by default) and it isolates the browser from plugin crashes (and I can kill the plugins if they use lots of CPU).
It is no surprise that the only people stupid enough to still be using that stinking pile of fail that is Firefox would make such a manifestly idiotic claim.
Now fuck off dipshit.
They didn't test FireFox? Because Chrome 4.x has Adblock, flashblock and noscript functionality is available in the Dev channel. I'm sure it'll be along for "Joe User" shortly.
You're modded to +5 insightful but 2/3rds of your list is wrong!
P.S. No need to take my word for it, see for yourself by going to https://chrome.google.com/extensions and then search on adblock or flashblock.
Real men telnet to port 443 and do the SSL encryption in their heads.
Now that they have this set of tests, do the same thing on WinXP and Vista.
But since I use Linux, I really don't care all that much about this test in the first place. Firefox for me, Opera as a backup, Konqueror bringing up the rear, and XP/IE7 on Virtualbox for those teeth-gritting (but getting more rare) occasions when it is absolutely the last option.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
We're just about at the point where's Microsoft's stranglehold on web protocols has been wrenched off. Standards compliance and all around browser functionality and performance are available from a range of great offerings.
I feel comfortable enough with the progress that I think I'll stop flogging Firefox as the wedge to get us to this point. I encourage you to try out whichever standards compliant browsers you're inclined to, and to use the one(s) you prefer for whatever reasons occur to you.
I might discourage using IE, however. There's no guarantee MS won't be able to regrab a browser monopoly and start corrupting protocols again.
Unfortunately, the way Chrome is designed doesn't yet allow for the adblocking the way it's done in Firefox. If there were a malicious ad, it's still rendered then removed from view with the Chrome solution for instance.
Or maybe popular sites feed much simpler versions of HTML/CSS to IE than standards compliant browsers
just add the ads/tracking to the urlfilter.ini file in Opera, and you don't need to worry about their scripting.
Yeah. Interesting to see how quickly Facebook would load on Firefox if you spoofed the IE user agent string...
I might have to try that tonight.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
SERIOUSLY? You’re asking someone to set script filtering by editing an .ini?
That’s worse than making them edit their about:config.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I think if these tests were redone with optimized settings in Opera, it would show Opera slightly ahead of Chrome. For example, on page load, Opera is set to draw in one second intervals during load, by default. Obviously for simple sites that load under a second, Opera will preform poorly. Another example is memory usage. They called Opera memory hungry but that is ridiculous. Opera allows you to set the maximum memory limit and is capable of caching to memory. Any unused memory is allocated to cache. You can greatly adjust Opera's memory usage by disabling page caching (set to 1000 by default), lowering maximum memory usage, removing history (set to 5000 pages by default), removing tab thumbnails; however, while Opera's caching may hurt memory usage, it is amazing in the long run. The equvilent to having a local proxy in your browser. Anyways, the bottom line is Opera's default settings are NOT optimal and modifying securtiy, history, memory, caching, DNS prefetching, and the UI can improve its overall preformance. I cannot say the same for chrome where the only optimizations that can be made is DNS prefetching and some security stuff.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Yawn. Call me when they have 3/3.
No sig today...
How roughly? IE definitely has nothing even remotely resembling an ad blocker. And: Can you block a specific HTML element in a page in Chrome? I doubt so.
Also, what is the point of blocking tracking pixels / web beacons, when you are using the browser of the biggest of all centralized data krakens: Google.
If the Google toolbar tracks, so does Chrome.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's news for me. I have lots of RAM in my system waiting to be used as it seems a bit faster then caching everything to disk. I want browser to use as much free memory as it wants if it makes it faster....
Enough about JavaScript speed! Could we focus on security, please?
All JS scripts run in a single address space. I'm a bit annoyed that any JavaScript coming from a 3rd party site (namely ads) have the same privileges as JS from the main site. There should be a way to sandbox JavaScript and DOM, or at least configure access privileges. For example, unless configured otherwise, anything in an iframe should be sandboxed, and there should always be some kind of end-user override.
It makes no difference whether you're a provider or an end-user. Since when can we trust advertisers not to abuse privileges? They already siphon usage statistics. When will they start keylogging? So much of the web is "2.0" that just turning JavaScript off is no longer an option.
Even the open source browsers don't seem to care. Are we really going to rely forever on 3rd party extensions to make up for security shortcomings in software products?
...which is the best pr0n viewer?
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
- Kazehakase and ELinks win hands down for me!!!
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
Call me when FF doesn't consume an obnoxious amount of RAM to open a few pages and doesn't have a screaming hissy about SSL certificates.
Different people, different needs.
Of course it's a lot more fun to act like a snooty teenager, isn't it?
What this article fails to test is standard daily browsing. It only testing fresh loads in a clear cache. I visit the same web pages frequently, just like everyone who browses the web. They need to test the speed of the browsers like this. How long does it take to load the same page a day after you went there? How long does it take for a page to load when you hit the back button? What they tested doesn't cover very much of real browser use. Another fun test would be how long it takes users to physically navigate to pages they visit. But it would be much harder to get scientific results like this.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
Chrome has adblock/flashblock, but lacks noscript right now. That's huge in terms of managing popups/malware imo.
SERIOUSLY? You're asking someone to set script filtering by downloading an extension?
Opera has that magic button that can switch off animated gifs and flash, so it is faster by default with no need for third party ad-ons.
Firefox is good for rich media websites and overloaded apps, because it handles them more stable. It has the easiest ad-blocker. Add some flash blocker to that and you are as good as in Opera.
Chrome is good for HTML coders, because it helps you to change HTML on the fly.
Also, Opera wins when it comes to password management and download speeds.
Yes. Most users don’t want to.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Firefox is the only web browser I have ever used that was able to reach over 1.5GB of consumed RAM while only a few pages were open. True I had left it running constantly for a week, but that is no excuse and Firefox should be able to maintain itself. All of the memory tests I see for Firefox involve loading it up and checking RAM use immediately. None of them ever show how much memory Firefox starts eating if you leave it running for some days.
I regularly leave Opera running for weeks or even months without any memory management or performance problems.
Come on. Please tell me that Apple didn't know better than to release Safari 4.04. lol =)
Popups yes, malware not so much, since Chrome isn't as insecure as Firefox.
No, you can edit filters in the content blocker dialog.
Clever signature text goes here.