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: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)