Tom's Hardware Pits Newest Firefox, Opera and Chrome Against Each Other

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 7 was released a couple days ago, and now the latest Web browser performance numbers are in. This article is the same series that ran benchmarks on Mac OS X Lion last month. This time around the new Mozilla release is going against Chrome 14 and Opera 11.51 in 40+ different tests on Windows 7. Testing comes from every category of Web browsing performance I can think of: startup time, page load time, JS, CSS, DOM, HTML5, Flash, hardware acceleration, WebGL, Java, Silverlight, reliable page loads, memory usage/management, and standards conformance. The article also has a little feature on the Futuremark Peacekeeper browser benchmark. An open beta of the next revision has just been made public. This new version adds HTML5, video codecs, and WebGL tests to the benchmark. It's also designed to run on any browser/OS/device combination — e.g. Windows desktop, iPad, Droid 2, MacBook, Linux flavors, etc. Another great read, a must for Web browser fanatics!"

Comments

Is performance really an issue?

[Kenja]

I've not worried about browser performance for a long while, lets face it, they're all fast enough. What matters to me is how they behave, their interface and site compatibility.

A+++++ WOULD BUY AGAIN...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Another great read, a must for Web browser fanatics!"

Seriously? Could you sound any more astroturfy if you tried?

Now if only they could measure user experience...

[bl4nk]

The constant barrage of updates for Firefox is frustrating to say the least. Having to go through the installer every month and have your extensions checked for compatibility and consistently get disabled... it's just not worth it. I switched to Chrome and have progressed through 8 whole versions without ever noticing and without ever having my extensions break. It's divine, and how all software upgrades should be done (in a perfect world).

Browser wars

[mgiuca]

Although it's only been one month since Web Browser Grand Prix VI: Firefox 6, Chrome 13, And Mac OS X Lion, the browser wars show no signs of subsiding.

Browser wars? It's competition, baby, not war. We're not waiting for a war to end so we can announce a winner and all switch to that browser. We're enjoying every glorious moment of a many-browser ecosystem. The "browser wars" were a time of nasty piling on of proprietary features in an attempt to gain an advantage. This is a glorious golden age of competition and (mostly) an emphasis on standards compliance.

Re:Results

[Baloroth]

Umm, actually, no. It's 1) Firefox 7 2) Chrome 14 3 )Opera 4) IE 9 5) Safari. Might look like IE>Opera if you only glance at the results. Read closer.

However, as far as I can tell they don't seem to be weighting categories (page and browser load times, IMHO, are much more important than WebGL, for instance, which they seem to have counted as 0 for those which don't support it.) Silverlight, especially, should deserve practically no weight in the final results at all. That said, the main browser problem isn't benchmarks or tests, its how well the browser behaves on sites that are poorly coded and therefore far more resource intensive than they should be. In my experience, those are the only times I notice a browser actually slowing down on anything like a fairly recent machine. Well, that and interface/ addon support.

Disclaimer: I use and love Opera.

Re:This is one of the worse bench compil ever

[Baloroth]

Where are you getting 438MB for Firefox 1 tab? The value listed is 42.3MB, and 475.3MB for 40 pages. I agree about the memory management thing (kinda). Firefox probably caches the pages to reload in case you open them immediately, though, so the fact it unloads that memory later but not immediately might be counting for it... IDK.

Re:Will this finally shut the trolls up?

[Reality Master 101]

Seems like just about every article that comes out about Firefox there's a dozen or so folks that keep complaining about how slow Firefox is and how much memory it leaks.

... And this is the problem with Firefox. The horrible memory leak problems have been traditionally dismissed by the Firefox team as only seen by "trolls". I gave on Firefox because it constantly sucked more and more and more memory, and I had to constantly restart the damn thing when it got over 2 gigabytes with a handful of tabs open.

Now, maybe the Firefox team (FINALLY) fixed it, and maybe they didn't. But we can't tell from this test, because they didn't do a memory leak test. What they need to do is open 41 sites, close 40 sites, open 40 sites, close 40 sites, on and on and see what happens. I know what will happen with Chrome -- since it uses a process per tab, all that memory will intrinsically get given back to the O/S. Firefox -- who knows?

But what I do know is that it's too little, too late for me. I love Chrome, and Firefox has no compelling features to make me come back.

Re:Now if only they could measure user experience.

[Kjella]

Really? Is the release cycle really the problem for you or something vague about extensions?

People have a problem with the rapid release cycle because of extensions, the point has been made many times now with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer. If you can't wrap your head around that concept, you must be a Firefox developer.