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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
The link was in the original submission. ScuttleMonkey apparently is too much of an idiot to remember to have copied that along when posting.
"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?"
I use Lynx you insensitive clod!
No, it's just slow because you are using IE.
And am I the only one who finds it fucking cynical in the extreme, to force you to surrender your email address just so you can use the printable version and skip the advertising crud ?
They only want to provide such a feature to members of the site. What's cynical about that?
Although Firefox somehow wins the "Page Load Times" category, which seems more important to me than javascript benchmark speed.
Lynx is for newbies. Real men telnet to port 80 and type in the HTTP headers manually, then parse the response in their minds.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...block all ads with Privoxy and shut off Javacrap.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
How does your favorite land in the rankings?
If it's your favorite browser, what does it matter how fast it is?
...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?
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Firefox may not be the fastest, but with its builtin function plus rich array of addons, it's the most useful.
And one of them was Apple's, another was Mozilla's and another was an independent 3rd party's test suite.
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
Only one browser in the list has adblock/noscript/flashblock.
Without those the other browsers are automatically losers no matter how fast they start up.
No sig today...
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.
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
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...
... wget.
Real geeks read straight html.
Have gnu, will travel.
...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.
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.
For very rough values of “roughly the same”.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
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?
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"