Firefox vs Safari vs Chrome vs IE8 vs Opera

[Scouzer]

Peacekeeper seems like a fairly accurate benchmarking utility. It's results seem to agree with the more complicated browser benchmarking methods. However, it's difficult to compare browsers as their result viewer kind of sucks. So I decided to benchmark all of the latest browsers together for your viewing pleasure:

browserresults.jpg

Legend:

Chrome 3.0.195.1 = Dev Channel
Chrome 3.0.193.2 = Beta Channel
Chrome 2.0.172.37 = Release Channel
Minefield 3.6a = Firefox 3.6 Alpha
Opera 10 = Opera 10 Beta 2

I hope someone finds this useful. It's amazing what a pig IE8 is. It's also amazing how in 6 months Firefox went from the king to being an absolute performance laggard.

It's also interesting to note I doubt the results of Firefox 3.6 Alpha; The rendering of many tests were incomplete or incorrect. I suspect the release 3.6 will be much slower, closer to 3.5.

 

[LuDaCriS66]

I don't see how Firefox is a "performance laggard" here. The only browsers that beat it in that test are the ones based on webkit which, we all already know, is the fastest.

Actually, Firefox was never really the fastest anyway, especially before tracemonkey came along. If anything, Opera seems surprisingly slow here.

 

[hclarkjr]

i have firefox 3.5.1 installed and am not seeing the lag people are saying about. i have had 2 lockups where i had to bring task manager up to close it though. but speed wise it is fine for me. i do have a lot of add ons installed so i think it is more me than firefox

 

[bunnyfubbles]

I dunno, does all this attention paid to speed really have much merit? I don't care if I have to wait a second to have absolutely everything loaded on a page, its been fast enough with typical broadband for years. That being said, security and features are far more important to me.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles
I dunno, does all this attention paid to speed really have much merit? I don't care if I have to wait a second to have absolutely everything loaded on a page, its been fast enough with typical broadband for years. That being said, security and features are far more important to me.

+1

Faster's better, but not at the expense of features. Firefox is the most fully featured browser out there.

 

[0roo0roo]

benchmarks mean squat. many times the actual speed difference in actual use when dealing with single pages is basically unnoticeable..you can always make bar graphs that make small differences look huge. just my experience with chrome vs firefox shows how far it is from a benchmark result. load up firefox with 100 tabs and any tab you click on is instant restore. multitask a bit with chrome and sh*t gets paged out of memory damn fast..and you end up bringing up the browser again..even with far less than 100 tabs, i generally have less than 15 in chrome and the hd churns a bit before anything appears after clicking a tab. we're talking seconds. and this is a 4gb ram machine. so in real world use..benchmarks mean squat.

 

[hclarkjr]

the add ons are what attracted me to firefox plus IE8 kept crashing on me

 

[totalcommand]

Will firefox ever switch to webkit? It's rendering is clearly outdated now.

 

[Scouzer]

Originally posted by: totalcommand
Will firefox ever switch to webkit? It's rendering is clearly outdated now.

I hope so. It's very slow, regardless of the benchmarks!

 

[LongTimePCUser]

I read the Peacekeeper FAQ to find out what it benchmarked.
This is what it says: Text
"What does it test?
Peacekeeper measures your browser's performance by testing its JavaScript functionality. JavaScript is a widely used programming language used in the creation of modern websites to provide features such as animation, navigation, forms and other common requirements. By measuring a browser?s ability to handle commonly used JavaScript functions Peacekeeper can evaluate its performance."

Interesting. But not a very useful benchmark unless you know what fraction of the rendering time a browser spends on running a site's Javascript. I suspect that for most sites, Javascript is a small fraction of the time a browser takes to render a site. I suspect that opening multiple tabs, rendering images, running CSS, etc. make up 90% of most most user browser experiences. I don't care if the last 10% is twice as fast in one browser than another browser. I want to know if one browser is faster in the 90% of the time that I am waiting to see a page render.

In other words, this is a benchmark that doesn't mean very much in day to day usage of a particular browser.

 

[Nothinman]

I hope so. It's very slow, regardless of the benchmarks!

I hope not, competition is a good thing and having a dozen browsers using the same renderer doesn't count.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: LongTimePCUser
I read the Peacekeeper FAQ to find out what it benchmarked.
This is what it says: Text
"What does it test?
Peacekeeper measures your browser's performance by testing its JavaScript functionality. JavaScript is a widely used programming language used in the creation of modern websites to provide features such as animation, navigation, forms and other common requirements. By measuring a browser?s ability to handle commonly used JavaScript functions Peacekeeper can evaluate its performance."

Interesting. But not a very useful benchmark unless you know what fraction of the rendering time a browser spends on running a site's Javascript. I suspect that for most sites, Javascript is a small fraction of the time a browser takes to render a site. I suspect that opening multiple tabs, rendering images, running CSS, etc. make up 90% of most most user browser experiences. I don't care if the last 10% is twice as fast in one browser than another browser. I want to know if one browser is faster in the 90% of the time that I am waiting to see a page render.

In other words, this is a benchmark that doesn't mean very much in day to day usage of a particular browser.

i run noscript anyways

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Browsers lag?

You must be running on some serious crap hardware if you think browsers slow you down. I just underclocked over 50% and FF seems just as snappy as before.

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
benchmarks mean squat. many times the actual speed difference in actual use when dealing with single pages is basically unnoticeable..you can always make bar graphs that make small differences look huge. just my experience with chrome vs firefox shows how far it is from a benchmark result. load up firefox with 100 tabs and any tab you click on is instant restore. multitask a bit with chrome and sh*t gets paged out of memory damn fast..and you end up bringing up the browser again..even with far less than 100 tabs, i generally have less than 15 in chrome and the hd churns a bit before anything appears after clicking a tab. we're talking seconds. and this is a 4gb ram machine. so in real world use..benchmarks mean squat.

Have you actually opened 100 tabs in firefox though yet hehe ?

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: pcslookout

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
benchmarks mean squat. many times the actual speed difference in actual use when dealing with single pages is basically unnoticeable..you can always make bar graphs that make small differences look huge. just my experience with chrome vs firefox shows how far it is from a benchmark result. load up firefox with 100 tabs and any tab you click on is instant restore. multitask a bit with chrome and sh*t gets paged out of memory damn fast..and you end up bringing up the browser again..even with far less than 100 tabs, i generally have less than 15 in chrome and the hd churns a bit before anything appears after clicking a tab. we're talking seconds. and this is a 4gb ram machine. so in real world use..benchmarks mean squat.

Have you actually opened 100 tabs in firefox though yet hehe ?

Roo dear, it's time you went out into the real world and learned how real web pages are rendered....

IE8 is only now usable on my quad @ 3.5ghz.

 

[MODEL3]

I'm in the process to change Internet browser, for my old PC!

The only thing that i'm interested is memory usage with 15-20 seperate processes (not 15-20 tabs within a process)

I'm between the latest versions of the following 2:

FireFox
Safari


Is anyone with personal experience that can suggest the better one regarding the above usage?


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AMD ATHLON XP 1500+
512MB RAM
XP SP2

 

[CU]

Does anyone know what the fastest browser is for a netbook with and atom chip in it? My first thought would be Chrome, but sense each tab is its on process I don't know.