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?"

Comments

Page load times...

[cplusplus]

...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?

Re:Page load times...

[shutdown -p now]

I wonder how reliable the JS script they've used to determine when page has finished loading really is. Could it be that browsers that report higher scores in the test are simply more truthful about what they finished loading? (e.g. do all of them correctly account for plugins?).

There's one other thing. Historically, the usual trick employed by browsers is to delay rendering the page until it is partially loaded, so as to not constantly re-render. This speeds up the overall page load, but starting to render faster may well show the important parts of the page (those that user cares about) earlier, and if the renderer is fast enough, re-rendering the page repeatedly as it is being downloaded may look "smoother" from user's perspective, and be more usable.

I know that this setting is configurable for Opera, though I don't recall what the default one is. I think it's also configurable for Firefox. IE always has a pretty significant delay there, and I believe it's hardcoded. No idea about Chrome & Safari. Anyway, my point is that, if this setting varies by default, timing of complete page loads can give quite differing results which are not reflective of actual user experience.

Re:Page load times...

[izomiac]

Startup time is the most visible, and essential for when you want to quickly check a single website (e.g. googling something really quick). Javascript speed is the limiting factor for web apps, flash speed for gaming.

Page load time is important, but dwarfed by network latency and speed in non-pathological cases, so I'd actually guess it's among the least important for end-users. Also, while there was a 20% difference between fastest and slowest, that's only about 1/26th of a second so it's approaching the limits of human perception. That said, ignoring 40 ms here, 50 ms there will lead to users finding a program laggy but not being able to specifically point out what's slow.

Re:Performance I care about is hard to measure

[shutdown -p now]

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?

Speaking of responsiveness, one neat thing about Opera 10.50 - all tab-specific dialogs are modal to the tab, not to the entire browser window. This means that, if a tab loading in background displays a JS alert, it doesn't suddenly pop up in your face requiring immediate attention - instead, the tab will get a marker indicating that something changed - and you can freely switch back and forth between tabs without closing the dialog first.

Re:Link

[Enderandrew]

Firefox has an intentional feature where they keep fully rendered pages in memory so they can reload faster when you hit back. They also keep full tab sessions in memory after you close tabs. You can turn these features off if you don't like them.

That being said, I leave Firefox open for days, if not weeks. I run tons of tabs, Greasemonkey scripts, extensions, etc. I haven't seen memory leaks since the Firefox 2.0 days.

I keep considered switching to Chrome, but Greasemonkey scripts still don't work properly, and I can't stop ads from loading. (Chrome adblock solutions render the ad even there is malicious code, but hides it from showing)

Paranoia

[MooseMuffin]

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.

Did anyone actually look at the tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Link

[DMUTPeregrine]

I have quite a few extensions*, 512MiB memory cache capacity set, and rarely see Fx using more than 550MiB of RAM. I don't have to reset it every hour, or even every day. *23 to be precise: Adblock Plus, All-in-One Sidebar, AutoPager, BetterPrivacy, DownThemAll!, FireGestures, Gmail Manager, Greasemonkey, Image Zoom, Leet Key, Morning Coffee, NoScript, Nuke Anything Enhanced, Password Hasher, PDF Download, RSS Ticker (CPU hog, that), Session Manager, Stylish, TACO, Tree Style Tab, Update Notifier, XUL Profiler, Youtube Comment Snob. Firefox 3.5.8, running on a Kubuntu 9.10 system. There could be Mac specific bugs, or some extension or plugin problem. But Firefox has gotten much, much better about actually freeing up RAM with the newer versions.

Re:Link

[obarthelemy]

very frankly, as long as its in the same ballpark, speed don't matter.

I find Tom's article ridiculous, for at least 2 reasons:

1- they focus on performance, and disregard features completely. That's their choice, but it's an idiotic one

2- they compare perfs in wildly different configs: a fully usable Opera (with its integrated mouse gestures, adblock, noscript, synch...) vs a unusable barebones Firebox with 0 addons.