Tom's Hardware Pits Newest Firefox, Opera and Chrome Against Each Other 272
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 7 was released a couple days ago, and now the latest Web browser performance numbers are in. This article is the same series that ran benchmarks on Mac OS X Lion last month. This time around the new Mozilla release is going against Chrome 14 and Opera 11.51 in 40+ different tests on Windows 7. Testing comes from every category of Web browsing performance I can think of: startup time, page load time, JS, CSS, DOM, HTML5, Flash, hardware acceleration, WebGL, Java, Silverlight, reliable page loads, memory usage/management, and standards conformance. The article also has a little feature on the Futuremark Peacekeeper browser benchmark. An open beta of the next revision has just been made public. This new version adds HTML5, video codecs, and WebGL tests to the benchmark. It's also designed to run on any browser/OS/device combination — e.g. Windows desktop, iPad, Droid 2, MacBook, Linux flavors, etc. Another great read, a must for Web browser fanatics!"
Re:Results (Score:5, Informative)
Umm, actually, no. It's 1) Firefox 7 2) Chrome 14 3 )Opera 4) IE 9 5) Safari. Might look like IE>Opera if you only glance at the results. Read closer.
However, as far as I can tell they don't seem to be weighting categories (page and browser load times, IMHO, are much more important than WebGL, for instance, which they seem to have counted as 0 for those which don't support it.) Silverlight, especially, should deserve practically no weight in the final results at all. That said, the main browser problem isn't benchmarks or tests, its how well the browser behaves on sites that are poorly coded and therefore far more resource intensive than they should be. In my experience, those are the only times I notice a browser actually slowing down on anything like a fairly recent machine. Well, that and interface/ addon support.
Disclaimer: I use and love Opera.
Re:Stability Tests (Score:2, Informative)
Although the curious side in me might want to see the results of such tests, the likelihood that someone would find such results useful in real world work is highly unlikely. In short, what's the point? At this point browsers have gotten to be fast enough that gains go largely unnoticed. I'm more interested in compatibility, recoverability, and feature set.
Re:Now if only they could measure user experience. (Score:4, Informative)
Besides, the updates install themselves now automatically. Good for you, switching to Chrome for that reason...it only does the exact same thing Firefox does now.
No they don't, not even remotely. When Chrome updates I normally hear about it on a Slashdot post. It does so without any user interaction at all, and without breaking any updates. It does so when the browser is not being used via the Google Update service so there's never even a blip in the user experience.
Firefox downloads updates while running. On next restart it pops up a window and as it updates it blocks you from using the browser until it's done, and requires user interaction. When it finishes it frequently disables plugins due to compatibility issues. Then after you hit ok it pops up YET ANOTHER BLOODY WINDOW in a browser tab this time to let you know YET AGAIN that it has updated something, just in case the last 5 minutes of your life weren't any indication. Not a problem if you're just starting the browser but if you open the browser by clicking on a link the least it could do after wasting 5 minutes of my life is actually show the bloody link I clicked on.
There is nothing automatic about Firefox's update process that is even remotely comparable to that of Google Chrome's. Actually it is only marginally better than any other application which has an update process, and even then only because it downloads first and asks questions later not giving the user the ability to ignore critical updates.