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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?"
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html
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.
And one of them was Apple's, another was Mozilla's and another was an independent 3rd party's test suite.
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.
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"