Google Chrome Tops Browser Speed Tests

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."

Not a suprise to anyone who has tried Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Google Chrome

[Voice of Meson]

What about the time it takes to switch to Firefox because Chrome doesn't work properly with Facebook?

Interesting, but nothing really new

[Bearhouse]

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:Safari? Safari what?

[rawg]

Yeah, I use the Webkit nightly builds. Webkit runs circles around everything else, plus it renders the Acid 3 test 100%. Yet reviewers will review beta/alpha browsers and leave Webkit out.

Re:Interesting, but nothing really new

[Bearhouse]

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:Interesting, but nothing really new

[huit]

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 aspects of society that I don't want to support, and would otherwise perish or wither due to lack of social recognition and discussion

I'll give up a few milliseconds.

[Beelzebud]

I'll give up a few milliseconds for Firefox's features...

Safari?

[herve_masson]

I'm surprized safari scored this bad. Anyway, Browsers are likely the most complex software to properly benchmark. Writing a tangible and useful conclusion from all those charts and numbers is nearly impossible.

I have coded a few large javascript/DOM-intensive applications and my overall feeling is that chrome rocks both on compliance and speed. It also seems much better on garbage collection than FF3, which stills badly suffers from unreleased memory. My experience with safari on those applications is good overall; faster than FF3 and a little slower than chrome.

Re:Interesting, but nothing really new

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Atti K.]

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?

Adblock or bust

[JustAnOtherCodeSerf]

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?

[Numen]

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?

Re:Interesting, but nothing really new

[TheSunborn]

Do you really believe that looking at adds create value for the society????

Why not Konqueror?

[Karellen]

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

Re:Not a suprise to anyone who has tried Chrome

[polar red]

And if you want 1 site to be able to use javascript, but you wouldn't allow another site to use it unless hell froze over ?

What's up with the Opera score?

[Anonimouse]

How is it that Opera beats Firefox in all but one test (SVG and Canvas) and beats it in the ACID3 and yet still gets placed 3rd? And then he says (despite it getting the highest ACID3 score) that both Opera and IE7 have compatibility issues? WTF?

How come the only beta browser tested was Chrome?

[rklrkl]

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.

Re:Who really cares?

[mattMad]

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.

Re:Google Chrome

[kestasjk]

But does it handle large web apps (which V8 was designed for) as well?

V8 (and Chrome in general) is the software form of a bet that the web is going to host larger and larger applications.

Re:Why not Konqueror?

[bcmm]

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.

Re:Interesting, but nothing really new

[TuringTest]

I never ever have bought a product found through an advert. So I'm actually costing less to the chain of advertising than if I actually downloaded their ads (ok, but more than if I never visited their sites).

Do you really think they'd be better off if I have actually seen their ads but never acted on them? That would imply being a leech to the people who paid for the ads, isn't it? How is adblock different?

Re:Not a suprise to anyone who has tried Chrome

[pdusen]

And also isn't nearly the same as noscript...

Rigged?

[Wingsy]

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.