Slashdot Mirror
The Latest Web Browser Grand Prix
An anonymous reader writes "The latest browser benchmarks are in... again. This is one of the better 'browser battle' articles, though. Chrome 13, Firefox 6, IE9, Opera 11.50, and Safari 5.1 are put through 40-some tests on both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion. As a PC guy, I was pretty impressed with the performance of Safari on OS X, and the reader feature looks awesome too. The author also uncovered a nasty Catalyst bug that makes IE9 render pages improperly and freeze up under heavy loads of tabs. The tables at the end pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of each browser, which is nicer than a 1-10 or star rating. The tests are more thorough than most browser comparisons I've seen."
Safari 5.1 on OS X on my 2.26ghz C2D laptop starts up, loads, renders and navigates pages notably faster than any other browser does on my unburdened Win7/64-system that runs a 3ghz C2D. While there is a thing or two that makes me prefer Chrome, Safari under OS X is definitely the absolutely fastest and swiftest browsing experience around.
Windows 7:
1. Chrome
2. Firefox
3. IE9
4. Opera
5. Safari
MacOS (Lion):
1. Safari
2. Chrome
3. Opera
4. Firefox
Safari on MacOS is almost as fast as Firefox on Win7.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Look at the computer from the next casual person you have? You'll notice that they're using 5% of their RAM and 2% of their cpu(s).
If only. Try firing up Firefox with 10-12 tabs and see it slowly, but steadly, eating you memory up. A browser is one of the many apps i run on my systems, so good peformance and memory handling has a definite impact on my user experience.
Sure, I'm not sure I'm aware of a modern browser other than IE that can't run a javascript blocker.
is that it works on Tom's Hardware articles.
http://chromeadblock.com/
http://safariadblock.com/
Yep, definitely no adblock there.
No testing under Linux ... like it is 1999. And this is on supposedly geek site? Meh.
Firefox 6? C'mon! I'm already on Firefox 7! Oh wait, hang on, there's an update for Firefox 8 now. Or should I go with 9 beta? Eh, 10 should be released tomorrow, right?
It's hard to use the computer when you find up the damn browser is eating half of your 4 Gigs of RAM :) I like Firefox overall, but they really need to start addressing their memory management issues.
This test exercises a situation that's very rare on the web (where by "rare" I mean that it's only been encountered in this test to my knowledge): thousands of absolutely positioned elements that are all being moved around using CSS transforms, with each one only being moved once by going from no transform to a translate transform. That's just not something anyone other than this test does. Most people who want to move an absolutely positioned element just change its .top and .left, but this test sort of went out of its way to do things the weird way.
The net result is that this test ends up hitting a rare-case O(N^2) codepath in Gecko. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641340 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641341 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=670311 for the bugs tracking this on Mozilla's end.
Fixing these has not been a terribly high priority, since it would mostly affect this one synthetic benchmark (I say "mostly", because bug 670311 could have benefits elsewhere too).
Chrome just has terrible page rendering performance. Firefox scrolls so much smoother.
The best comparison is google image search. Chrome can not even scroll google's own image search smoothly. Firefox does it as smooth as butter. Chrome also scrolls bing's image search poorly as well. Firefox wins in rendering performance.
Even the fish bowl test shows firefox is far better at rendering.
I once had a doctor just like you. I've had a sleep issue for twenty-five years, during which I've become more adept than your average goat at noticing certain details of my physiological state. This particular doctor implied that I was so naive about the scientific process as to verge on creationism and that I matched any wacky hypothesis to reality with no regard to observation. He told me I had no data.
Actually, what I have is an R workspace with an 80,000 line CSV file extracted from Firefox showing my browsing activity over about a year period during which the white band of "away from my desk" appearing roughly once every 24 hours migrates diagonally on the circadian plot with a one hour daily drift. I've managed to treat this subsequently with carefully timed melatonin administration and have reduced the period to roughly 24.15 hours. Miss just one sunrise control pill and I'm an hour pregnant the next morning. And since I've never had a reverse gear on this hasty blue marble, that adds up to a week of night shifts sooner or later.
The other aspect of 80,000 Firefox page requests over a one year period is that I have actually noticed Firefox being one of the worst GD memory pigs of in all of god's creation without consulting system monitor, so STFU about the system monitor. Maybe I installed too many useful extensions, but then if I didn't want the extensions, I would use Chrome instead.
With 200 tabs open in eight FF clients spread over nine desktops, after about ten days, I can often type half a dozen words during frequent FF gcgag stalls (garbage collect gag) before my text blurps out. Whenever FF virtual memory climbs to over a gigabyte, I pretty much have to close my eyes while typing, as the feedback loop in the HTML input box causes me more distress than assistance. I participated heavily in a FF beta a couple of years ago where memory usage was three times worse than it is now. I was restarting FF every few days just to clear the constipation. This on a Linux system with 4GB of memory since upgraded to 8GB.
Thanks for giving my asshole GP a nice pat on the back in his self-satisfied assessment of the observational powers of his hapless sleep-deprived clients.
I'll give a site ad revenue as long as it chooses to show text or still-image advertisements. I've just blocked the MIME type of a certain Adobe product for sites not on a whitelist. Do you think add-ons like Flashblock are an acceptable compromise between the interest of keeping my web browser experience clean and fast and site owners' interest of drawing ad revenue?
Swearing at my GP was actually helpful this time around, so I now have one positive swearing result out of N as N goes to infinity concerning this medical interaction.
I've got the data set under my thumb to show the man the back of my hand, but it's technically tricky to precisely fit negative attestation data: my FF stream tells me when I'm awake and clicking but not when my cheek is lolling on the Z key.
I just realized I can score each moment in time by linear distance to nearest click (painting my life with a snore to shore metric) and then use the R package FDA (Functional Data Analysis) to fit the data on a Fourier basis using the harmonic acceleration penalty to smooth the curve.
Harmonic acceleration makes my furrow my brow. It's defined as:
L = omega^2 D + D^3
where D is differentiation. Don't completely grasp why this works and haven't tried it out yet.
Ramsay, Hooker, and Graves mostly use it to fit precipitation data. On my personal weather channel, there would be the daily peregrinations of the sand man: the sun will be rising hours before summoned and hang in the sky much longer than usual due to an extraordinary ideation wave, followed by not very much for a day or two. Same old same old. Why do I even tune in?
Wow, sounds like we've got a firefox fanboy here. I've actually never met one before. Who are you to comment on how a program is affecting someone else's computer? You have no idea of the setup (aside from the 4 GB of ram), and no idea even what operating system is installed. But you first say ram is meant to be used, as if the browser is the only program running on the system, and then simply deny the fact. I personally have seen firefox use much more than 2 GB of ram during normal usage (though normal for me tends to be more like 20 tabs). It's a horrible memory hog, and simply asserting "no it isn't go bury your head in the sand" is not going to make that change.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Note, I had to remove the greater signs for the code to display on /. It would be nice if there was a [code] tag.
Slashdot allows you to format your posts with HTML. Use < for <. And you removed the less-than signs, not the greater signs.