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?"

Link

[mingot]

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

Re:Link

[verbalcontract]

And the conclusions:

Category / Test: Overall Winner

Startup Times: Opera

Memory Usage: Firefox

Page Load Times: Firefox

HTML: Safari

CSS: Safari

Tables: Safari

JavaScript: Chrome

PeaceKeeper: Opera

Acid3: Chrome

DOM: Chrome

Flash: Opera

Java: Opera

SilverLight: Firefox / Internet Explorer

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.

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:Chrome = teh winnar!

[ircmaxell]

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)...

Re:So?

[PRMan]

Do tell. Since I've never found a per-site whitelister like NoScript on anything else.

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 [chromium.org].

Re:You newbie

[HaZardman27]

I'm pretty sure it's there, it's just disabled by default in Vista and 7. You need to the add or remove Windows features window to install it.

Re:So?

[Dracker]

Opera's got it built in!

Preferences - Advanced - Content. Disable Javascript there.
Visit a site you want whitelisted? Right click - Edit site preferences - Scripting - Enable Javascript.

Easy!

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic...but if you aren't, the good part of noscript is the ability to block all the javascript that is tracking/adds while allowing the script that allows forms to be filled out and videos to play.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Link

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot if you choose Firefox over Opera because of bloat. Firefox is the MOST bloated popular browser out there.

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"