Browser Shootout: IE vs. FF vs. Chrome vs. Safari vs. Opera | Hacker News Reader

Browser Shootout: IE vs. FF vs. Chrome vs. Safari vs. Opera

tomshardware.com

29 pointsmcxx17 comments

I wish he'd include a margin of error, mean, and median in his graphs. Quotes like this make me very leery of the reported result:

  Since this is a stopwatch test, the 0.3 seconds longer it takes Opera to open eight tabs than it does five could very well be human error.

  Load times for Yahoo! fluctuate in Safari by a full 100% during the tests. Beside the Facebook variation on all browsers, this is the most significant aberration during the page load time tests.

  The load times for Facebook fluctuate the most out of the Web sites tested during our page load time testing. This was experienced across all benchmarked browsers.

I agree, these tests are quite useless. In addition to the points above:

1. The huge variability in load times for various pages clearly depends much more on the page being loaded rather than the browser.

2. There is no discussion of what a meaningful test result might be. What does it mean if one browser is 10milliseconds faster than another in an artificial benchmark?

3. Some of the browsers couldn't successfully complete the benchmark, but were still included.

4. The overall winner is determined by the number of wins in each category. Internet explorer bombs on all the artificial bench marks, but loads real pages quite well. Because there are only 5 page load tests and 13 benchmarks, it loses badly. Honestly, which is more important?

My own computer never agrees with these benchmarks. For me IE starts up way faster (2-3 secs) than Firefox (5+ secs).

Btw, does it annoy anybody else that to view the print version you need have an account.

It annoys me more to have the ad follow me on the right hand side. I like supporting ad-driven websites, but why not used position: fixed instead of a bouncy JS animation?

Position fixed doesn't work in IE6.

(But it's better to use it in browsers that support it, of course.)

Yes, but if you check out the site they don't just update the position to mimic fixed, they "bounce" it into place.

Just a guess, but is IE preloading in the background?

IE pre-loads at Windows start-up, effectively. If browser start-up time bothers you, there is a fast start-up pre-load thing for Firefox. Personally I just load Chromium when I login and leave it open until the next restart, possibly weeks away.

I'm not interested in many of the measurements done. - Startup times: I usually always have a browser window open and never shut it down - Memory footprint: Don't really care unless it leaks - Rendering speed: I don't see a whole lot difference between browsers and the margin of error in the tests makes it difficult to come to any conclusions.

I use firefox and love it. It's consistent between different operating systems, mature and most importantly has great plugins.

I've recently started using Chrome (for the first time seriously since it was released) and I find it much snappier than Firefox, but there are two major issues I take with Chrome.

1) The lack of slash searching, like vim, less, etc. I know about the type-ahead extension, but it doesn't use the native search option that you'd get with CTRL+F, or F3. / is the natural search key for me, and I find it distracting to have to use CTRL+F to bring up the search. Furthermore, Google employees have stated in support threads that they have no intentions of ever allowing slash-searching, which I find rather disturbing: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=095c...

2) When maximized the tabs at the top of the bar are bothering me, since I keep a small Winamp window on the top of my screen. This interferes with Chrome's tabs, and can be quite annoying (screenshot: http://sigmafiles.com/gulp/forum/16932/chrome_max.png ).

Conclusion: taken over a broad range of speed tests, Chrome narrowly edges Opera. Safari is a solid third, Firefox a solid fourth, and IE is dead last.

But there's more to a browser than speed. While I'm currently using an older version of Firefox, I love Chrome's homepage (showing your most-visited sites). I love Opera's mouse gestures, too.

While I do agree that Memory usage should be kept somewhat in check within reasonable boundaries, what on earth is the problem with a browser using available memory to accomplish speed and good response time?

I use Firefox myself and not Opera, but my work laptop has 4GB of RAM and my desktop at home has 12GBs of RAM. I don't want those to go wasted if they can be put to good use.

For the memory test I'd actually rank it the opposite way, or just omit it all together.

Depends. I don't consider my browser my primary application my computer so I like it to save as much memory as it can for the truly horrid memory hogs like Adobe suite and my development IDE. I have 8gb on my laptop (macbook pro), and its still not enough.

On mac, there's no worse culprit than Firefox. I'll regularly need to kill it after I see it taking up 2.5GB of ram (even when all tabs are closed).

Chrome might lose the micro memory usage benchmarks, but its much more stable. Even after opening/closing hundreds of tabs for days, it'll never start taking up GBs of ram.

Really, memory _leaks_ are the issue. I have created a web application that needs to poll the server every few seconds. I've done everything I can to prevent memory leaks, even using a pool of reused DOM objects. I ran it for about 15 hours. At the end, Firefox 3.6 was using only 42 MB of memory while IE 8 was using over 650 MB.

Agreed, long term memory usage is what they should measure. Leave the browser up for a while, come back, and compare the usage statistics.

I am still surprised at how Firefox lags behind, as in the lack of progress there. On Ubuntu 9.10 x64 firefox is horrifically slow. The only reason I don't run chrome for everything is because I can't reload a single frame and firebug is just uber better than chrome's kits.

Agreed. Wild speculation, but I think the Firefox codebase might have hit critical mass and its just too hard to manage it. I'm anticipating using Chrome much more once webkit improves their dev tools to surpass firebug (what's the hold up!?).

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