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

[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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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"