Ultimate Browser Showdown
We are living in a fantastic time for browsing the Internet. Not only are connections faster than ever but browsers have finally made the instantaneous web and ultimately an online OS tangible. I’ve run several tests comparing the next generation of browser to each other in javascript and page load time – arguably the two most important statistics about a browser. The results were definitive in both a winner and loser.
The browsers tested were Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Opera 9.64, Safari 4 beta, Google Chrome v1.0.154, SRWare Iron v2.0.168, Firefox 3.1b3, and Firefox 3.0.7. Below we have the collected data presented in graph form. We’ll spend the next few days going over this data in more detail.
All tests were performed on my Lenovo t61p laptop running Windows Vista. The laptop has a Core 2 Duo T9300 2.50GHz CPU, 3.0GB of RAM, a 160GB 7200 RPM HD, and an NVIDIA Quadro FX 570m workstation graphics card. My Internet connection is provided by the University of Georgia on a very fat pipe and routed through OpenDNS servers.
Javascript is more and more important in today’s web. Everything from email clients to webpages to games depend on the language. Typically, javascript has been the major bottleneck of browsers making the Internet slow to a dredge. This is no longer the case, in some browsers, as new javascript engines make the web faster than ever.
The first test run was the standard javascript benchmark, the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. This test runs 5 times and gathers an average. I ran the test 3 times for each browser resulting in a total of 15 tests for each program. The average times are provided below (lower is better). Click to view a bigger graph.
Internet Explorer 7 is over 34x slower than the fastest browser, SRWare Iron. Here is the same data without Internet Explorer 7 to give a better comparison between the faster browsers. Again, lower is better.
Next is the Google V8 JavaScript Benchmark. This test was run five times and averaged resulting in the below data. Here, a higher score is better.
Last, and possibly most important, is page load average times. For this test, the Lifehacker Stopwatch bookmarklet was used to test the load time of USA Today in order to simulate average browser use. This test was performed five times for each browser and averaged, any outliers were removed and then an additional test was performed. Lower (in milliseconds) is better in this test.
I’m a 19 year-old Telecommunications Arts major at the University of Georgia. I write about film, photography, and technology in addition to sharing ideas, reviews, and materials.
Hmm. A bit deceitful to compare Iron running on Chrome 2.0 architecture to Crome 1.0, don’t you think? And try the latest nightlies of Firefox (3.6a1pre) along with the Opera 10 alpha so long as you’re going to extend this privilege to Iron. You’ll get far more fair comparisons and you should see that these other browsers are making good strides from the benchmarks you’ve charted of their older, more stable versions.
But ultimately I’m happy there is this speed war going on between the major browsers. The ultimate winner of all this is the users, and I’m happy to see the speed that first wowed me with Chrome is being worked on for my default browser (Firefox nightly builds) along with those of others. When browsers compete, we all win. To think, if not for these competitors 95% of users might still be using the same IE6.
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