Web Browser Grand Prix 273
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?"
Re:A link to the article would be nice. (Score:4, Insightful)
The link [tomshardware.com] was in the original submission. ScuttleMonkey apparently is too much of an idiot to remember to have copied that along when posting.
Re:Of course ... (Score:3, Insightful)
And am I the only one who finds it fucking cynical in the extreme, to force you to surrender your email address just so you can use the printable version and skip the advertising crud ?
They only want to provide such a feature to members of the site. What's cynical about that?
Re:Chrome = teh winnar! (Score:2, Insightful)
Although Firefox somehow wins the "Page Load Times" category, which seems more important to me than javascript benchmark speed.
In absolute terms, they're all slow. (Score:0, Insightful)
Sure, Chrome is relatively faster than Opera, which is relatively faster than Firefox, which is relatively faster that IE.
That still doesn't change the fact that, in absolute terms, they're all horribly slow for the comparatively simple tasks that they do. And we know exactly what the problem is: JavaScript.
JavaScript is a hack. Nothing more, nothing less. It was originally meant to allow simple event handling. Unfortunately, some people took it seriously, and now it has become a "first-class" programming language, although in every single way it just plain shouldn't be.
Life would be so much better if we had better-designed and better-implemented languages available in the browser. It's not like we don't already have them; we do! Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, Lua, and Scheme are just a few.
We just need Google, Apple, Opera and Mozilla to realize that JavaScript needs to go. Together they can make any one of those aforementioned scripting languages widely supported. Browser performance will skyrocket, developing client-side web applications will become much more tolerable, and most importantly, nobody will have any reason to use JavaScript.
Re:Link (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [tomshardware.com]
If you want a fast web browser... (Score:3, Insightful)
...block all ads with Privoxy and shut off Javacrap.
Re:Chrome = teh winnar! (Score:2, Insightful)
I would love to see these tests done with only independent benchmarks.
Re:Fuck. That. Multipage shit (Score:1, Insightful)
Favorite Browser (Score:2, Insightful)
How does your favorite land in the rankings?
If it's your favorite browser, what does it matter how fast it is?
Functionality More Important Than Speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WebKit For The Win (Score:0, Insightful)
Good job apple fan. Always able to turn any news into good news for apple.
There's more to a browser that the renderer. Chrome has a better javascript engine than Safari. Also, Opera and Gecko look pretty good in the rendering department, with Firefox taking the page load times benchmark.
In conclusion, stop sucking on Steve Jobs' cock, you don't know where it's been.
Re:So? (Score:2, Insightful)
Only one browser in the list has adblock/noscript/flashblock.
Without those the other browsers are automatically losers no matter how fast they start up.
Performance I care about is hard to measure (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Link (Score:3, Insightful)
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:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Link (Score:3, Insightful)
My own testing of Firefox doesn't ever show the massive memory leaks often claimed.
Re:Link (Score:1, Insightful)
Windows doesn't even have fork(), you newb.
Re:If you want a fast web browser... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
For very rough values of “roughly the same”.
Re:Link (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Link (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
The memory comparison tests were flawed enough to keep me from taking any of their results seriously. While there was very little mention of how memory usage was determined, what little there was indicated that he used the task manager and, for Chrome, added up the totals for each Chrome process.
This is a well covered mistake that has been pointed out since the first tests that showed Chrome being a memory hog. And while I won't get into it, the simplistic method the review seemed to use shows a complete and utter lack of understanding of the concept of shared memory. So many people have made this mistake that the Chrome developers even created a page [about] you can load in Chrome that will show you an accurate total of the memory used not only in Chrome but in any other browser you have running. But I would have expected someone working for a technical publication who's about to publish an article partly on the subject to do the limited research necessary to learn why such a simplistic measuring tool such as the task manager is completely unsuitable for tests like the ones they performed.
Suffice it to say if the memory usage comparison was as naive as it appears to be, I've got very little confidence in any other metrics they gathered or any conclusions they reached.
Re:Link (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't bloat if they are features you want. It is only bloat when they are features somebody else wanted.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)