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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?"
The link was in the original submission. ScuttleMonkey apparently is too much of an idiot to remember to have copied that along when posting.
A lot of these speed tests always compare javascript performance, which I have to say matters less for me on a day to day usage than other things.
At the end of the article (10 pages later), they do break it out into categories. The winner of the 'page load' category is: Firefox.
I care about other things as well, startup times for example (won by Opera), but if I had to pick one most important category for me, it's page load times. YMMV, obviously.
Shortcut to summary: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558-10.html
Firefox may not be the fastest, but with its builtin function plus rich array of addons, it's the most useful.
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.
I care about other things as well, startup times for example (won by Opera), but if I had to pick one most important category for me, it's page load times. YMMV, obviously.
I care about security and safety, so I just avoid IE. I care about privacy so I avoid Chrome. I care about bloatness so I avoid Opera. I care about functionality so I choose Firefox. I think it's the lesser of all evils. Correct me if I am wrong.
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
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
...block all ads with Privoxy and shut off Javacrap.
And then browse with blazing speed ... the 3 web sites that remain partially functional without Javastuff, that is.
Check out my novel.
Firefox with even just a couple extensions is WAY more bloated than Opera.
The other day, I turned JavaScript off on my browser (I had a reason...maybe testing or annoyed by ads on a page...I don't remember exactly), but forgot to turn it back on after I was done with whatever it was that I was doing. A little later, I opened FF again, and wondered why so much of the content I expected to see in my browser was missing.
As you said, YMMV, but I would say that JavaScript execution time is pretty much every bit as important as page load unless you have limited your web browsing to pages created back in the '90s.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
It isn't bloat if they are features you want. It is only bloat when they are features somebody else wanted.
Rod Taylor