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

Link

[mingot]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html

Re:Link

[Snowblindeye]

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

Re:Link

[Dumnezeu]

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.

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)

Re:Link

[Dracker]

Firefox with even just a couple extensions is WAY more bloated than Opera.

Re:Link

[element-o.p.]

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.

Re:Link

[rtaylor]

It isn't bloat if they are features you want. It is only bloat when they are features somebody else wanted.

Re:A link to the article would be nice.

[Lunix Nutcase]

The link was in the original submission. ScuttleMonkey apparently is too much of an idiot to remember to have copied that along when posting.

Re:Slashdotted

[number17]

No, it's just slow because you are using IE.

You newbie

[MrEricSir]

Lynx is for newbies. Real men telnet to port 80 and type in the HTTP headers manually, then parse the response in their minds.

Re:You newbie

[StikyPad]

Mere child's play. Real men telnet on port 443.

is Safari startup time really surprising?

[nxtw]

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.

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.

Functionality More Important Than Speed

[amustic]

Firefox may not be the fastest, but with its builtin function plus rich array of addons, it's the most useful.

Re:Chrome = teh winnar!

[Lunix Nutcase]

And one of them was Apple's, another was Mozilla's and another was an independent 3rd party's test suite.

Performance I care about is hard to measure

[nxtw]

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.

Re:So?

[BitZtream]

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.

Re:If you want a fast web browser...

[thomst]

...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.

Chrome memory usage

[l00sr]

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.

Re:A link to the article would be nice.

[Brian Gordon]

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"