Chrome 4.0 Vs. Opera 10 Vs. Firefox 3.5

Jim Karter writes "In a three-way cage match, LifeHacker threw Chrome 4, Firefox 3.5, and Opera 10 into the ring and let the three browsers duke it out to see which would emerge as the fastest app for surfing the web. Quoting: 'Like all our previous speed tests, this one is unscientific, but thorough. We install the most current versions of each browser being tested — in this case, Opera 10, Chrome's development channel 4.0 version, and the final Firefox 3.5 with security fixes — in a system with a 2.0 GHz Intel Centrino Duo processor and 2GB of RAM, running Windows XP.'"

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the article you'd see safari is in most of the tests.

Re:Safari

[abhi_beckert]

Safari is in the test. It's just that they focused on the three new kids on the block, of which safari 4 is not among.

TFA does list results of Safari and IE, as well as other browsers, for every test in a separate graph.

Summary:

[d3ac0n]

Google Chrome is generally faster, but seems to use more memory than either other browser at start up. However, the performance difference between the browsers is negligible.

Personally, speed isn't everything. The reason I've stuck with Firefox, even through the Awful Bar debacle of 3.0.x, is the functionality it offers via it's add on system. Opera and Chrome simply do not offer this. Until they do, I don't have a good enough reason to switch.

Safari 4?

[Val314]

What about Safari 4 with its fast JavaScript engine?

Re:Versions

[nycguy]

4.0 version is in the dev channel. [blogspot.com]

Re:javascript whitelisting ?

[Kjella]

Or just use site preferences in Opera....

Re:javascript whitelisting ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or pera , browse to a page right click and choose "Edit site preferences" You can control if you want scripts running , content blocked, cookies accepted, enable or disable sounds and a few other things on a site by site basis.

I just switched and I am finding the adjustment from FF rewarding but not as smooth as I would think. I believe Opera is a better browser which needs a little more polish than it currently offers. Not in features but in small UI tweaks and additions.

Re:Memory

[hattig]

Of course using Windows Process Monitor to get memory usage for a application like Chrome which has different processes per tab/plugin leads to horrendously incorrect results, which the article acknowledges in an edit, without any attempt to get the correct figures. Shame really, as this functionality is built into Chrome...

Re:Summary:

[A Friendly Troll]

Agreed on the extended functionality - I hate the 'Awesome Bar', but no other browser offers keyword searches or the ability to easily add search engines to the search box (save for IE which I dont want to use).

Start Opera. Go to a website not included by default in its search options. Right click on the search field. Choose "Create Search".

Give me something to replace 'wp rabbits' and I will dump Firefox in an instant for Chrome or Safari.

Built into Opera before Firefox had it.

"Centrino Duo Processor"

[Timosch]

Sorry guys, but Centrino is not a processor. It is a platform, specifying a certain processor, graphics chipset etc..

Re:Summary:

[macshit]

You can't disable it - thats the debacle. A lot of people don't like it, but the Firefox devs have essentially told us to shut up and live with it.

C'mon, they haven't really said that -- you can actually config it in various ways, e.g., setting "browser.urlbar.matchbehavior" to 3 (using about:config), and using "browser.urlbar.maxrichresults" to control the display. There's also some more configuration being added in newer versions, e.g., see this bug [mozilla.org].

Fabulously useful Firefox speedup

[David Gerard]

on Unix, anyway. Exit Firefox, then do:

for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i "vacuum;" ; done

FF3.x does everything in sqlite. Some of the tables fill with crap 'cos deleted rows are marked "deleted" rather than actually being deleted and compacted. I hope future versions will run a vacuum automatically every now and then.

On this Ubuntu 9.04 box I had to apt-get install sqlite3.

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the latest major release of Safari (the 64-bit 4.0.3 that shipped with Snow Leopard) came out a whole 10 days ago. That's old news!
And it's only half again as fast as the last released version due to 64-bit optimizations for the javascript engine. That's no big deal!

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

New versions you fucking moron. Opera 10, Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 4.0 are all newer than Safari 4.

Re:Fabulously useful Firefox speedup

[mindcorrosive]

Or use the Vacuum Places Improved (what kind of name is that anyway) addon from AMO:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878 [mozilla.org]
Available for FF 3.5+. Labelled experimental at the moment, but works just fine. Works magic with the "awesomebar" suggestion speed: fetching suggestions has never has been so snappy.

Re:speed

[PouletFou]

You can use chromium on linux. I prefer it to firefox now because when flashplugin crashes (often on x86_64), chromium does not have to be restarted, a simple refresh works.

Re:speed

[abshnasko]

In my case, judicious application of AdBlock and NoScript make this a complete non-issue. I'm far more interested in standards compliancy and security.

Reality suggests exactly the opposite. Adblock, Noscript, and whatever other browser plugins you use, in addition to most of the UI code on web pages, is written in JavaScript. Browser speed, and particularly JS execution speed, does matter. In fact, since you are running these applications, which run Javascript to customize your viewing experience, you probably depend on speed more than you think.

Memory hogs

[Theovon]

Firefox still has lots of problems. (For instance, preventing sleep on the Mac and using excessive CPU for completely idle tabs.) But the first reason I keep using it is memory. It uses less memory than any other browser for the same set of open tabs. Also, it has PROPER built-in crash protection and session restore. Safari doesn't unless you install Saft, and Saft costs money and keeps breaking every time Apple upgrades Safari.

IE has been VERY vulnerable.

[Futurepower(R)]

That doesn't make sense. IE had had a long, long, long list of very serious vulnerabilities. Literally billions of dollars have been lost because of sloppy coding in past versions of IE.

Re:Safari

[Nadaka]

It also would not run on the not apple certified hardware running win xp that was the reference machine for everything else, so the comparison would be moot.

Re:javascript whitelisting ?

[Hal_Porter]

Site preferences in Opera is a complete pain to use.

Firstly, there's no toolbar button to bring it up, it's buried under 3 levels of menu selection.

Right click, edit site preferences. Not admittedly that I use it much.

Unintuitive graphs

[anilg]

..insignificant the discrepancies are..

Mod parent up.

The Tab loading graph (http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/17/2009/09/500x_eight_tab_load.jpg) seems to suggest Opera takes 4X, and Firefox 2X the time to load tabs than Chrome.. however, the X-axis is drawn from 6.0 to 9.0

If the Graph was rendered from 0-9, it would look like below:

Opera
================
Firefox
==============
Chrome
============

.. which shows that page loading is pretty much the same everywhere.. blowing the OMG-Chrome-loads-fast!!!! myth.

Electrolysis

[Björn]

Mozilla's Electrolysis [mozilla.org] project aims to change that. The first bootstrapping step was completed 15-July-2009.

"The Mozilla platform will use separate processes to display the browser UI, web content, and plugins. The working name for this project is Electrolysis. "