What’s the Fastest Web Browser in the “Real World?” Chrome. | Hacker News Reader

What’s the Fastest Web Browser in the “Real World?” Chrome.

techcrunch.com

38 pointsnathantross34 comments

So this benchmark measured "how the population actually experiences web browser performance", and the article pronounces Google Chrome as the obvious winner, with the slight sidenote that FF 5 has a faster "perceived render time"?

It just seems slightly disingenuous.

Obviously Chrome is really the fastest. Firefox just seems the fastest ;-)

Yeah, the title is really ridiculous here. Chrome won one metric; Firefox won the other. Mozilla has every right to cry foul.

While Firefox does appear to render the page faster, it also seems to wait longer to start, so its page-loading experience is something like "......show."

Chrome starts rendering sooner but takes longer to do it (probably as it waits for pieces of the page to load) so its experience for me is more like "...shoooow."

I don't think it really matters either way, although Chrome 13's pre-rendering stuff often tips the balance that way.

Exactly. The title should be: What’s the Fastest Web Browser in the “Real World?” Firefox.

But given the size of the images with the chrome logo its not a far fetch to figure out they're being paid by Google for this study. lol.

"The second metric, perceived render time (green), refers to the amount of time it takes for the visible portion of the page to load in the browser. Again, Chrome did well here (2.374 seconds), but in this case, Firefox 5 did better (2.18 seconds)."

I bet this gap gets larger the more tabs you add. Chrome starts choking after about 40-45 tabs... Firefox can handle 200 easy.

The problem with Firefox is that "tab groups" function is horribly broken(as in, should not have been included yet) and that Tree Style Tabs just encourages opening hundreds of tabs.

Do you find it a normal use-case to have 40+ tabs open in a single browser window?

I only ask because that seems like it becomes unusable ~20 tabs, maybe this is heavily subjective but I cannot maintain anywhere near that number of tabs in a single browser window.

I rarely have fewer than 40 tabs open... I usually have about 80-110 but I would like to bring it down to about 60 or so though. Tree Style Tabs makes it easy to gather up tabs but when it comes time to delete them I hesitate or they're hidden under a top tree node where it would take too much time to clean it up.

I think I just found an extension that could replace Tree Style Tabs. I was looking for something like this last month didn't see it. This puts the Tab Groups in the sidebar. .

Pano: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pano/ https://github.com/teramako/Pano

What I like about this extension is that the tree would only allowed to get 1 level deep. With Tree Style Tabs, many tabs I don't want anymore can hide under a top tree node. Also, it looks like it will play well with Tab Mix Plus and I can keep the top tab bar.

Honest question -- why?

The only time I have more than 2-3 tabs open is when I open a bunch of articles at the same time (like on HN), to read through one-by-one, closing them as I go along.

How do you keep track of all those tabs? Why not just use bookmarks, open what you're interested in, and then close it?

I'm sincerely interested in this from a UI point of view...

And if your interest is speed in visualization, if the answer isn't a special list of sites that browsers might pre-render in the background, so your favorite sites always "loaded" instantly?

I have tons of tabs open mostly because I hate the back button. Every time I open any new page it goes in a new tab. Any time a page will be relevant for more than the next five minutes, it gets moved to the front or back of my list (depending if it's for business or pleasure). If it might be interesting, it floats in the middle, otherwise it gets closed.

Admittedly this is probably a strange way of working with the web, but I like to be able to easily find things that I've been working on recently. Only at the end of the day do I fully scan through my tabs and bookmark anything I'll need to reference later.

My pal has this usage pattern, as well. Seems nutty to me, but it goes to show everyone has their best way of working.

My primary complaint about Tree Style Tabs is that the nesting gets unwieldy. I have been meaning to check out Vertical Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...). It's by the same developer who made BarTab. Some of the reasoning behind it is explained here http://philikon.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/tabs-tabs-tabs/. It similarly limits the tabs to a single category. I'll have to try out this Pano extension too.

I sincerely did not know about the tree-style tabbed browsing feature. I attribute this to my initial apprehension in adopting tabbed browsing to begin with, thanks for the info!

I also think this has a lot to do with browsing style as well. For purposes like my own I rarely need to have more than 5-10 pages actively open. I make extensive use of bookmarks and generally group my tabs in separate windows for organization purposes.

With tree-style tabs (a fantastic Firefox extension) opening large amounts of tabs becomes more common because you can manage different lines of thought, and everything else sort of collapses down. I commonly have about 100 tabs open.

I could understand a tree-style view to help categorize, I will have to check that out as it sounds very nice.

I was asking from a perspective of standard tabbed browsing that doesn't have a form of organization like this; IMHO under such circumstance so many tabs would be unmanageable or confusing at very best.

I've never observed Chrome to choke when upwards of 50 tabs are open, while firefox, back when I used it, would fall over with around that many. So experiences vary.

I'm in your boat. I was stress testing it earlier (probably Chrome 11, under Linux) and I could put 100 tabs with actual content up without too much trouble. Switching tabs was slower, but not unusable (~700 ms to switch).

Chrome is very fast and I do love it, but it still doesn't have a hardware accelerated HTML5 canvas. So if you open up a HTML5 game, IE and FF5 skip along nicely, but Chrome gets very choppy.

I hope they fix this soon, because if your "real world" involves "playing HTML5 games", Chrome is one of the slowest!

Edit: here's a little HTML5 "game", try it in IE9, FF5 and Chrome: http://www.scirra.com/labs/ghostshooterfullscreen/

I find Chrome for Os X as being very "aggressive" with caching. Sometimes it's misleading as what I am seeing is not what I should see. That forces me to clear the cache more often than other browsers. I love the speed but start to wonder wether the price to pay is worth. I'm not even sure what I am saying makes any sense, does it?

Yes! They cheat! Sometimes my internet connection will go out and all my tabs in Chrome lose their scrolling ability! It's like they just cached a bitmap of the page instead of the actual page itself.

It would be interesting to see some additional data - for instance, the load & perceived render times for each browser under different operating systems - how is Safari on OS X vs Safari on Windows? Chrome & Firefox across Linux, Mac, and Windows?

I imagine that Safari is predominantly on OS X, and IE on Windows. Does that affect the load and render times? I guess since the two fastest (Firefox & Chrome) are also on all platforms, and probably more equally distributed, that would suggest that the OS isn't as important - but without more information, that is just a guess.

Fx is consistently faster than Chromium on my Linux machines, while my roommate notices the inverse on his Windows machines. It's definitely partially OS-dependent.

Obligatory "what about Opera?"

Don't be silly. Everyone knows the only use of Opera is lifting their age-old features and advertising them as revolutionary.

- remembers 5.12

Ofcourse, I do love the Opera app for iPhone, which is a lot faster then the Safari standard.

That's because Opera Mini isn't a normal browser. It's something like a thin client. Opera's servers do all the rendering and shoot things to your phone in a little binary file which the app just has to display.

Opera Mobile and Opera Desktop are more conventional browsers.

There is a "thick client" opera browser as well. Good browser.

Kinda cruel to do speed test and ignore browser which advertised itself as the fastest browser on Earth not so long ago.

I only know one thing for sure around this discussion:

FF runs netflix without hitching on my 2008 macbook. Chrome drops frames about once a second and I get an un-watchable movie.

This very well could be because of Silverlight, but I don't know enough of about the underlying connections between Silverlight and the browser to judge this. As an end-user the experience is still the same.

I do, however, still use chrome for everything else. The unified search/url bar hooked me and I can't go back.

I'm not sure how big a difference it really makes, but you can tweak the "perceived" render speed in FF by changing how long it waits between starting to get data and rendering the partial page. Go to "about:config" and add a new integer called "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" to something lower than the default of 250 (milliseconds).

And how much faster will page load times be with thorough blocking of ads and the kind of third-party scripts needed to gather this data? I'd bet even a halfway-decent ad blocker will make far more difference than choice of browser.

I'm curious about how much of this could be caused by the confounding influence of real world Chrome users being more technically savvy and therefore more likely to have good broadband connections.

Is that true? My computer savvy friends are slow to switch from Firefox, because they've come to rely on certain plug-ins. My non-computer savvy relatives, who kept switching back to IE if I gave them Firefox, are all using Chrome.

It's a cliche but we really do benefit from all the competition.

Heck I am still on Firefox 3.6 and perfectly happy.

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