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Google Chrome Tops Browser Speed Tests

Posted by kdawson on Tue Nov 25, 2008 03:15 AM
from the there-fixed-that-for-ya dept.
Software Businesses Google The Internet
ThinSkin writes "So many Web browsers, so little time. The folks at ExtremeTech have assembled the ultimate browser test to determine which Web browser is king. From speed tests to rendering tests, different browsers traded off wins, but Google Chrome came out on top."
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Submission: Which Web Browser is King? by ThinSkin (851769)
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Google Chrome Tops Browser Speed Tests 50 Comments More /

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  • Google Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)

    by freakmn (712872) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @03:21AM (#25883129) Journal
    Guess I must be the only one here using Chrome. No other comments yet.

    But seriously, the speed difference is noticeable. When I'm on my mac, I miss using it. Plugins are hard to come by, but other than that, it's great. Quick as Firefox used to be.

  • Not a suprise to anyone who has tried Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25 2008, @03:22AM (#25883139)

    But speed isn't everything. The moment Chrome lets me use the 17 extensions I have to firefox and is still the fastest, I applaud. Currently I couldn't even consider having to lose all the extensions that help web development and surfing...

    This thing should be clear to everyone by now.

    Use Chrome if you want speed, Firefox if you want extensions, IE if you just want to annoy the hell out of all us Firefox fanboys, Opera if you want a ready package of speed and features, etc...

  • Safari? Safari what? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tyrione (134248) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @03:31AM (#25883203) Homepage

    You're using a non-release Chrome and yet I'm not seeing a nightly build of Safari referenced.

    The Developer Preview of Safari 4.0 trounces Safari 3.1.x.

    The Safari nighly builds trounce all over Safari 4.0 developer preview.

  • Interesting, but nothing really new (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bearhouse (1034238) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @03:31AM (#25883209)

    Summary: IE is crap, Safari has some issues, Opera most compatible with Acid 3, Firefox is OK and Chrome is fast but not finished.

    So, a stripped-down browser is fast. Wow.

    In the real world, I'll be sticking with Firefox, with Ad blockers, Greasemnkey etc.

      • Re:Interesting, but nothing really new (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Bearhouse (1034238) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @03:45AM (#25883295)

        You are a leech on the rest of society

        Because I use ad-blockers? How about people who use TIVO? I have no problem paying for stuff, and contribute to free projects, donate to Wikipedia etc. Just because I sometimes want a less-intrusive browsing experience does not make me a leech. And who gives a shit about karma anyway?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by huit (1285438)

        A leech because we want to explore the internet without unsolicited ads? A user may be interested in exploring a sites content only to be exposed to unsolicited (and importantly here, unannounced) advertising. Seems to me like adblocker is a great service

        Just because you make money from ads doesn't mean it's the only way for "society" to grow fruitfully, in fact I'd argue that it is unnecessary (though heavily relied upon because it is an option). That advertising provides disproportionate support to aspec

          • Re:Interesting, but nothing really new (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25 2008, @04:21AM (#25883531)
            In order to receive an ad, I have to actually request the ad (part of how HTTP works). Sure, my browser's default behavior is to request all images/flash/etc, but I can easily instruct it not to.

          • Re:Interesting, but nothing really new (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Atti K. (1169503) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @04:22AM (#25883545)

            Using ad-blocker is simply stealing. And yes I do call it stealing because you are incurring a cost on the content provider without compensating them. Its no different from stealing at a store with poor security.

            So, is using links/lynx/w3m stealing too? Is turning off images in Firefox and not installing flash stealing too?

  • That's not the browser speed (Score:5, Funny)

    by DreamerFi (78710) <john&sinteur,com> on Tuesday November 25 2008, @03:32AM (#25883223) Homepage

    That's just the rendering engine they're testing. My browser is called "AdBlock".

  • Wrong use case (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bazald (886779) <bazald@z[ ]pex.com ['eni' in gap]> on Tuesday November 25 2008, @03:52AM (#25883333) Homepage

    ...at least for me. I don't care about optimizations that allow a page to be loaded and rendered 0.1 seconds faster. The lower bound on how fast a page loads is rarely imposed by the browser anyway.

    I often like to use the "Open All in Tabs" feature of Firefox, in which an arbitrarily high number of bookmarks in a folder are opened and loaded simultaneously. I can open and load 15 sites (with adblocking) in under 3 seconds. Chrome seemed to take a second to open just one tab, let alone 15.

    I'm not saying I'm the normal user, but test more than the scripting engine and the rendering system before saying a browser "tops speed tests".

  • I'll give up a few milliseconds. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Beelzebud (1361137) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @04:01AM (#25883391)
    I'll give up a few milliseconds for Firefox's features...

    • Re:I'll give up a few milliseconds. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Woldry (928749) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @05:06AM (#25883807) Journal
      Amen! Whatever time Firefox may lose in rendering is more than made up by features such as having a menu accessible via the keyboard, "Undo close tab", searching for text when I start typing, and extensions like Add to Search Bar, DownThemAll, Add Bookmark Here, and Uppity. Not to mention "runs in Linux"...

  • Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)

    by roca (43122) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @04:30AM (#25883587) Homepage

    There's some weird stuff in this "article". For example, what does it mean to "include V8 code" in a browser? Even choosing V8 as a benchmark is a mistake. Sunspider is the standard JS benchmark and it's much broader in scope.

    Awarding 10 points for winning a category and then adding up the points to reach a final score is the most statistically bogus "methodology" ever.

    It's nice to see SVG and canvas in benchmarks, but "IE8 will fix that compatibility issue"? Completely untrue, IE8 will not support SVG and canvas. This bit of ignorance makes me worry about the whole piece.

    And as others have noted, comparing the Chrome beta against various-aged releases of other browsers makes little sense.

    • More ignorance from the article:

      We tested the version of Firefox (called Minefield) that does include the V8 code and listed those results below our "official" findings.

      Let it be known now and henceforth, Google Chrome IS THE ONLY BROWSER USING V8. Safari's new stuff is SquirrelFish and Mozilla's is TraceMonkey.

      Please know this before you write an article making yourself look foolish.

  • Adblock or bust (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JustAnOtherCodeSerf (181281) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @04:31AM (#25883599)

    Till it's got adblock, I don't care if it renders pages before they exist. I don't care if it makes me breakfast or does my laundry. In short, without adblock, it ain't S**T.

  • Why IE7 and not IE8? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Numen (244707) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @04:35AM (#25883623)

    Chrome is the current browser beta from Google, and IE8 is the current browser beta from MS... so why compare Chrome in the same group as IE7?

  • Who really cares? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DNS-and-BIND (461968) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @04:55AM (#25883751) Homepage
    OK, maybe it's just me, but browser speed has absolutely not been an issue since the Netscape days. I've never said, "gosh, these pages look great, but they're just being rendered too slowly!" and then abandoned a web browser. The only thing that's an issue is download speed - rendering speed is not even noticable. Is this just me? I get the feeling that the "browser speed" issue that slashdot talks so much about is like some obscure industry metric that is rather meaningless, but still gets brought up in conversation because it's a bright shiny number that people can quote when regurgitating arguments.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mattMad (1271832)
      I agree to some extent. However, since more and more application functionality (e.g., Google Mail replacing your local email program) is pushed into the browser, performance gets more important again. People just want their web apps as snappy as their local applications.

  • Why not Konqueror? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Karellen (104380) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @05:00AM (#25883773) Homepage

    Why does no-one include Konqueror in these tests? It's even available for Windows [kde.org] these days.

      • Re:Why not Konqueror? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by bcmm (768152) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @06:11AM (#25884183)
        Don't be stupid.

        Konqueror sucks. On most of the sites I visit, it doesn't render the page properly

        In KDE 4, Konqueror uses effectively the same rendering engine as Safari, and I for one have not been encountering many rendering errors. Which sites misrender for you?

        For that matter, Even Firefox 3.0.3 continuously crashes on my Fedora Core 9 installation.

        The majority of the Firefox codebase is cross-platform. If it crashes on Linux, you can bet it'll crash on Windows too, under similar circumstances*. In my experience, it is equally (un)stable on both platforms.

        I use Konqueror for most things due to it's speed, and Firefox when I have to use Windows, and for the occasional sites which insist on specific browsers or use broken flash-detection scripts (why must sites try to decide whether you can have flash content instead of just sending you the tag and seeing what you do with it)?

        * Barring buggy plugins, that is. For me, Quicktime causes more crashes than any plugins on Linux.

  • How come the only beta browser tested was Chrome? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rklrkl (554527) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @05:26AM (#25883933) Homepage

    It's quite dubious that the only beta browser tested was Chrome, especially when most of the others have publicly available beta versions available for testing. Yes, I understand that the *only* release of Chrome is a beta, but then either Chrome should be disqualified from testing since it's not a final release or other browsers' beta releases should be allowed into the test (why not include both a final and beta release of those in that case, so we can see if there are improvements in the beta?).

    I'd also like to see tests on non-Windows platforms as well, although Chrome scores as badly as IE here - it's *only* available on Windows at the moment and there's been a vague promise of ports to Mac and Linux, but these seem to be predictably dragging on and on.

  • Rigged? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wingsy (761354) on Tuesday November 25 2008, @07:01AM (#25884421)
    Is it fair for them to run these tests on different machines? If you'll notice, Safari was run on an obsolete Mac Mini, a relatively slow single core laptop in a desktop box. Some poster there had run his own tests with the browsers in question, all on the same machine and he got different results -- Safari was fastest. I think they should have also tested Safari on a standard issue Mac, like a current iMac.

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