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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?"

13 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Link by mingot · · Score: 4, Informative
    1. Re:Link by verbalcontract · · Score: 2, Informative

      And the conclusions:

      Category / Test: Overall Winner

      Startup Times: Opera

      Memory Usage: Firefox

      Page Load Times: Firefox

      HTML: Safari

      CSS: Safari

      Tables: Safari

      JavaScript: Chrome

      PeaceKeeper: Opera

      Acid3: Chrome

      DOM: Chrome

      Flash: Opera

      Java: Opera

      SilverLight: Firefox / Internet Explorer

    2. Re:Link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

      You are an idiot if you choose Firefox over Opera because of bloat. Firefox is the MOST bloated popular browser out there.

  2. is Safari startup time really surprising? by nxtw · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Chrome = teh winnar! by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 4, Informative

    And one of them was Apple's, another was Mozilla's and another was an independent 3rd party's test suite.

  4. Re:Chrome = teh winnar! by ircmaxell · · Score: 2, Informative

    Remove that test from the results, and Chrome still wins. But look at the results of that test. Chrome wins, yes. But not by a HUGE margin (the difference between second and third is larger than 1st and 2nd). At least it's not as bad as the Dromaeo test (Where Opera is out in front by so far, it seems more like a bug in the test than a win for Opera)...

    --
    If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
  5. Re:So? by PRMan · · Score: 2, Informative

    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...
  6. Chrome memory usage by l00sr · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:You newbie by HaZardman27 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm pretty sure it's there, it's just disabled by default in Vista and 7. You need to the add or remove Windows features window to install it.

    --
    Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
  8. Re:So? by Dracker · · Score: 1, Informative

    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!

  9. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?

  11. Re:A link to the article would be nice. by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google Chrome comes out on top and the writer seems to make a good case for it.

    The most interesting conclusions seem to be:
    -Firefox is the most memory efficient with multiple tabs (!)
    -Opera uses a lot of memory
    -No browser really has a performance advantage across multiple sites (for example Facebook is really optimized for IE for some reason)
    -Even professional writers don't know how to use the word "faze"