Chrome 4.0 Vs. Opera 10 Vs. Firefox 3.5 354
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.'"
Safari (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you read the article you'd see safari is in most of the tests.
Re:Safari (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the parent's point is that the 64 bit version of Safari is ~10 days old. Being 64 bit should qualify it as a *new* version over the 32 bit version previously available in pretty much any review process.
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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:Safari (Score:5, Funny)
Back in the old days we used to eat people who did that so that the knowledge they had gained unnaturally could be shared amongst the whole tribe. Now people have gone soft. Still one day the old ways will return.
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Now people have gone soft.
Yes. They get softer if you cook them. Very good for digestion.
speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Memory (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Memory (Score:5, Informative)
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:Memory (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing these tests don't take into account is the UI responsiveness, in which Opera really owns the other browsers - everything just seems fast and responsive. Chrome isn't that far, but you can still see how things like opening new tabs takes some time and isn't "instant". Firefox is also behind on UI responsiveness, and I probably dont have to mention IE (3-5 secs to open new tab, seriously?).
This is what MS tried to improve in Win7 too. Even if its not really faster technically but just feels so, it improves usability a lot.
Re:Memory (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Memory (Score:5, Funny)
everything just seems fast
So true. More benchmarking tests need to include seems per second. I mean, come on, it's the 21st century and all! At least, it seems to me they should. That way their reports will seem much more seemingly accurate to what I want them to seem. ... I think.
Re:Memory (Score:4, Insightful)
You could measure the average time from clicking a UI element to something happening. Actually I wish people would test things like this rather than how quickly the Javascript implementation can crack brute force crack DES or whatever benchmarks Google are pushing so their prototype stuff can finally be released without people mocking it for being bloatware that is worse than Vista.
It would also let me avoid Java applications - we have some horrible intranet ones at work that feel like your mouse has a dodgy button or something - you click stuff, assume it didn't notice it and click another couple of times before you see an hour glass cursor. If people tested for UI responsiveness at least I could avoid things that don't have it in situations were I have a choice.
And, as a bonus it would encourage people to stop doing things that could potentially take more than a few milliseconds in the UI thread of Windows applications. In a very real sense UIs are a real time system and it is time more people realised the implications of that.
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The user's subjective experience will sell a product - or not.
I don't care HOW MANY benchmarks a browser might win. If I click a link, and the browser changes to a plain white page, then sits there for 5 seconds, it sucks. On the other hand, if I click a page, immediately see title, wait second for the background, another second for banners to fill in, yet another for the adverts, etc, I can SEE something happening. Even if it takes a full second longer for the page to be finished, I feel like the browse
Re:Memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Please bear in mind they tested on the latest stable version firefox, not the latest alpha 3.6 which has various speed improvements. Yet Chrome they used a development branch. Seems a bit biased in Chromes favour.
Firefox is unstable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, Firefox has bugs in its event handling, apparently. If you open a large number of Window and tabs, and keep opening and closing tabs over a period of hours, eventually Firefox will crash. Firefox has had that problem for many years.
Firefox also apparently has problems with its cache handling, apparently. For example, here is a comment to the Lifehacker.com story referenced in the Slashdot summary:
"Firefox 3.5 seems to get slower for me over time. It was really crawling the other day so I got the latest chrome and it seems blazing fast.
"I'll have to try some of the tricks to clean up FF. I'm sad to see it falling behind in speed because I like so many FF features."
If Chrome ever gets the necessary add-ons, such as AdBlock Plus, I'm guessing that people will abandon Firefox. There seems to be no hope that Mozilla Foundation will ever be managed well.
(I like seeing ads, I just don't like flashing, moving ads. "Marketing" people are amazingly ignorant, in my experience; they often don't realize that annoying people is not a good way to get customers.)
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Chrome + some privacy features and an adblocker.
Re:Firefox is unstable. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. I'm sick of Firefox's crashing and periodically hanging for 30 seconds while it garbage collects or something.
I'm willing to switch to the first browser that gives me the equivalent of Firefox + CS Lite + NoScript + AdBlock. Personally, I'd have thought that a simple UI for allowing the current site to use cookies and scripts would be a basic feature of any browser, but it seems the browser makers are more interested in not annoying site owners who want to track users and show them ads.
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If Chrome ever gets the necessary add-ons, such as AdBlock Plus, I'm guessing that people will abandon Firefox. There seems to be no hope that Mozilla Foundation will ever be managed well.
If Chrome ever gets the necessary add-ons, it's performance will be on par with FF.
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You're really that sure the FF codebase is that very close to optimal, for what it does?...
Re:Firefox is unstable. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlikely.
Firefox addons run in the same process as Firefox, likely in the same thread. Firefox tabs are similar. All it takes is one slow extension to slow down the entire experience.
Chrome, on the other hand, is implementing addons as just privileged webpages. This means that, except for the very small part of an addon that might be interacting with the current page, the addon won't block the browser -- it's mostly going to be running in a separate process. And even the content script that's running on the current page, well, there's one of those running per tab, so an extension being slow in one tab won't block another tab.
Not to mention, if you're going to implement a nice, cross-platform Firefox addon, you're doing it in Javascript/XUL. Chrome addons are Javascript/HTML. Thus, Chrome's faster Javascript engine does count here.
Electrolysis (Score:4, Informative)
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. "
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What do you base that assumption on? I haven't seen any benchmarks that compare the difference between Firefox without and without add-ons running.
In fact it's standard practice to benchmark products "out of the box" and note any changes from the out-of-box state (i.e. anything you've done to it beyond the install process from the manufacture). A Firefox vs Chrome (or whatever) benchmark wouldn't have a Firefox loaded with
IE has been VERY vulnerable. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:speed (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. How many more stories about browser-speed do we need, given how insignificant the discrepancies are? For most end-users, browser lag is completely dwarfed by restricted bandwidth.
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.
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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.
Unintuitive graphs (Score:5, Informative)
..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
============
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For a better job, and more ideologically pure, why not? ;p
But seriously, what you've done was of course completelly reasonable (accidentally...using Opera might also fall under similar categories, since its advantages become more apparent the slower the machine and connection is). And so is liking OSS, even if not exclusively using it (I do try to limit my pet projects to OSS). It's mostly just "I must have OSS browser on Windows" that I have a problem with...
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You're not concerned about the speed of your browser because historically your browser is something that's run too slow for anything interesting to be done with it. If browsers were faster (as they are becoming) they could do things that would suddenly make you care about how fast your browser is. Rendering full blown 3D using just Javasript is one example, and we've seen some demonstrations of this being feasible with some of the newer browsers in recent times.
I followed the same line of thought as you pre
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When firefox crashes - everything goes poof. Worse, firefox does NOT let me launch separate firefox processes to workaround that stupidity. It is ironic that I can run separate instances of IE but I can't do that with firefox - an application that should be more "unixy" than IE.
When I tried Google Chrome on Win XP, it did not allow me to launch it as a different user. I prefer to run my browsers using different user
Choices? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, what you are saying is that if you used XP, you wouldn't be limited by those choices. Windows gives you more choice?
Well, it does, unless you limit your choices by placing preconditions.
Re:speed (Score:4, Informative)
javascript whitelisting ? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's simple : i want javascripty whitelisting. so FF+Noscript : only thing i can use.
Re:javascript whitelisting ? (Score:5, Informative)
Or just use site preferences in Opera....
Site preference in Opera laggy (Score:2, Troll)
My computer has 3GB memory and that dialogue takes ages to disappear and appear.
It's very slow for some reason. The Opera preference panel sometimes freezes when I press Ok. ...wonder if having 100s of tabs open has anything to do with it.
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Nope. I used to have this problem with just a couple of tabs open. This problem is what drove me from Opera back to Firefox.
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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.
Secondly, the browser doesn't tell you which domains are trying to set cookies or run scripts, so you have to guess.
Thirdly, it's only simple to set preferences for the current domain. You can't set preferences for other domains that the current domain accesses.
Compare to CS Lite + NoScript and you'll see how badly designed and functionality-poor Opera's site pr
Re:javascript whitelisting ? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:javascript whitelisting ? (Score:4, Funny)
Well Opera is immune from that sort of thing because only about 10 people use it so no one bothers to hack it.
Err.
I mean "You're totally right! Opera is a security nightmare! Don't ever use it!"
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Like on one of the virtual machines I use to test sites my customers suspect might be giving them spyware? Uh, yesterday we picked up 3 different infections of "smitfraud" based scareware...
Versions (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Chrome 4.0? I just one hour ago upgraded to latest Google Chrome beta of coming 3.0 version from Google labs. (3.0.195.10). If 3.0 has not come yet out, how can they test 4.0?
Re:Versions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Versions (Score:5, Interesting)
So they compare the current, stable release of firefox against dev builds of other browsers?
And as others are saying, the fastest way to render a page that has a ton of scripting is of course firefox + noscript.
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And as others are saying, the fastest way to render a page that has a ton of scripting is of course firefox + noscript.
You mean, the fastest way to partially render a page? Sometimes parts of script-heavy websites are implemented in CSS, but most often even layout elements require javascript. You end up with just navigation, or just content... or just a big empty page. I'm using noscript right now, but you have to factor in the time you spend enabling some or all of the scripts on a page if you default to scripts disabled (as I do.)
AdBlock (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, the fastest browser is the one that's running AdBlock, with flash, java, and javascript disabled.
Re:AdBlock (Score:5, Funny)
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Thank you, Captain Pedantic.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
echo "http://www.vordweb.co.uk/standards/lynx_text_browser.htm" | mail -s "YOU ARE VIOLATING UK Disability Discrimination Act (Part III) YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DIDN'T LIKE THE DISABLED?!" webmaster@website.com
Problem solved.
Re:AdBlock (Score:5, Funny)
Well no shit Sherlock ... how long does it take to render an empty page ?
Re:AdBlock (Score:5, Funny)
RTFA, dammit, it depends on the browser!
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Hey, you forgot to disable that pesky HTML. Let alone all images!
How can you surf that way? Everything but plain telnet is way too cluttered, slow, and has too many holes in its parser!
And don't dare to use and ANSI colors on me! Even if my client could parse them, I'd still have to buy one of those useless color displays!
But I'm thinking about just connecting the Ethernet cable to my headphones and listening to the noise of the packets...
You are on slashdot... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is a technology website dedicated to of people who take great pride and joy in disabling every new bit of technology in their stack.
Personally, I leave all that stuff on. I used to disable javascript out of the same "spite" most of slashdot commenters seem to have--but that was before Kuro5hin came with their fancy dynamic comments in what, 1999? So far, my CPU's have never melted, my power supplies are still purring, and my mice haven't keeled over and died.
Wonder what rigs these people run? 386DX 40mhz's? Orange screen VT100's hooked up to the local time-share in the university basement? ... remembers when his public library still had those VT100's.
Thorough? (Score:2)
Not sure how that would make any measurement thorough.
Summary: (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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Give me something to replace 'wp rabbits' and I will dump Firefox in an instant for Chrome or Safari.
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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).
Give me something to replace 'wp rabbits' and I will dump Firefox in an instant for Chrome or Safari.
In Opera: tools, preferences, search.
Wikipedia is already in there as a default though ("w rabbits").
Re:Summary: (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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no other browser offers keyword searches
Like most cool browser features, Opera had it first.
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Saft for Safari.
Documented in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Searching#Browser-specific_help [wikipedia.org]. There's even a trick to do it in IE.
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What debacle are you refering to? The awesome bar is fast and useful. It's never failed me. So what debacle?
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.
Its a fairly fundamental change to browsing habits, and quite frankly I don't wish to change my habits on the whim of someone else.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty much.
Although at least you can disable some of the more annoying aspects of it via Tools - Options in 3.5.x. Basically, I jumped from 2.20.x to 3.5.x after getting frustrated with 3.0.x and deciding to stick with the 2.20.x version for a good long while.
While I don't think we will ever get the proper revert to the 2.x style URL bar that SHOULD happen, as
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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].
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Yes, they have.
The general user base was NOT included in the discussion about the Awful Bar during development. Now, the only way to communicate with the Devs is through the incredibly obtuse and confusing bugzilla system by bugging a problem. After FF 3.x was released, ANY "bug" of the Awful Bar has been immediately and rudely closed as "not a problem, will not be fixed".
So basically, the FF Devs created the Awful Bar in a vacuum, and have refused to listen to any criticism in the only communication chan
Re:Summary: (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep hearing a few loud people complaining about the awesome bar, but I can't for the life of me figure out what they don't like about it.
Because people using the same computer will see their porn bookmarks. Embarrassing for a 15 year old when their mothers find the carefully hidden list by typing in something innocent in the address bar.
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Safari 4? (Score:2, Informative)
What about Safari 4 with its fast JavaScript engine?
Raw speed is probably a moot point.... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. the author did not put any version of MS internet explorer in the Arena. Now that's understandable, all windows system come with IE installed, so the rationale, as I see it , is that there's no point in benchmarking a program that no one has to choose on its own. I only wonder what will happen if Europe goes forward in forcing MS to sell OEM copies of Win7 without IE installed.
2. the whole "speed" thingy is rather moot in my view. I've been using Firefox for some time now, and I DO appreciate the fact that fewer resources are used, even at the expense of a couple of seconds of starting and/or loading time. After all, it's not a multiplayer game where milliseconds seem to count.
Re:Raw speed is probably a moot point.... (Score:5, Funny)
After all, it's not a multiplayer game where milliseconds seem to count.
You forget you're on Slashdot. The Windozers will race to post XKCD 619 on every Linux-related story, and it gets neck and neck for the karma boost that "+5 Insightful" offers.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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No, I'm claiming that quote tags suck. Also, that XKCD 619 isn't goddamn funny anymore because it was played out so much that it became unfunny, then funny again, and then boring as hell.
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the author did not put any version of MS internet explorer in the Arena. Now that's understandable, all windows system come with IE installed, so the rationale, as I see it , is that there's no point in benchmarking a program that no one has to choose on its own.
Without a benchmark for IE, how do you know whether to replace IE on the computer you just bought with one of the above browsers? IE might be the quickest browser there is. *
* Hahahahhahahaha!
XP, 2 Gigs RAM (Score:2)
I'd be more interested on the speed tests on machines with smaller memory, since a big win in browser development for me is bringing older kit back into play by making it more comfortable for websurfing. (I'd also be interested in seeing browser comparisons under Linux instead of XP too)
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There's a pretty easy answer to that one - use Opera. Its snappiness means it's enjoyable on older machines (even my old dual pII 266 with 192mb of ram is fine).
Probably the reason when it has quite big market share in many ex-Eastern Block countries, where PCs have much longer life. And why it's available (with basically the same engine) for smartphones for so many years / works good even on old & slow ones (and how many years do we wait for mobile Mozilla?...)
"Centrino Duo Processor" (Score:5, Informative)
Fabulously useful Firefox speedup (Score:5, Informative)
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:Fabulously useful Firefox speedup (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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How incredibly important! (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't care about security. We don't care whether the browser hogs half a gig or more. We don't care whether it can render a page correctly or makes CSS look like a 5 year old had a field day with some sharpies.
We care whether a page renders 0.223 seconds faster.
Sorry if that sounds like flamebait, but do I care about speed in a time when speed difference is measured in fractions of seconds? Even if it's seconds. Does that really matter? I'm not too convinced that the browser speed plays any significant role in the loading speed of a page when you have crappy servers crammed into farms that oversold their capacity hundredfold and ISPs doing the same.
Re:How incredibly important! (Score:4, Interesting)
Let' *again* calculate why your browser "hogs" half a gig of RAM:
How many tabs do you need for that? Well, Let's say your average tab has 4 pages. With 1660x950 pixels (without the window borders & co) in uncompressed (what you need in memory) full color they are coming to 18 MB. Now add the uncompessed source files in the cache, the DOM/parse tree, the JavaScript instance, and the other tab object data, at, let's stay low and say 2-10 MB. And we get to 20-30 MB. Then add Flash (which is leaking all over the place itself) for another couple of MB per tab.
Now we're getting to 25-17 tabs, when leaving out the Flash.
So how many tabs do you have open usually? Does it fit?
What do we learn: Don't expect that because the page, stored on disk, is only a couple of kilobytes, that it won't take up much RAM or CPU. After all it's highly compressed!
Poor tests (Score:3, Insightful)
It's obvious Chrome would be faster becuase of its simplicity...
What always bothers me is that these "testers" don't test the browsers after some "normal" or "not quite so normal" use.
People don't just start a fresh install of a browser and open eight tabs, people have lots of bookmarks, passwords, saved forms in browsers and after a time, these affect the speed and performance of a browser.
A good tester should bookmark about 200 sites in various categories, save passwords for about 20-30 sites, have some forms saved, and then he should see how much latency browser has from the moment you start typing an URL in it's address bar and bringing URL's or suggestions from its separate SQLite databases that hold bookmarks and previously accessed websites history (it shouldn't matter but in reality users usually stop from typing when they see something changing on screen and check the url and suggestions and time is lost)
Also, in my case I work with various web apps that basically make me access hundreds of url's like site.com/page.php?id=[number] , so all these are saved in the history and after about a week, I basically have to clear the database because Firefox becomes too slow to load, it takes up to a second from the moment I start typing a website in the address bar and so on, I have to empty the history to make it work properly again...
I use Firefox and it's not perfect and not the fastest, but I still prefer it over Safari or Opera simply because of extensions like Firebug or Live HTTP Headers or even Screengrab, which make my life way easier.
Chrome memory? (Score:2)
My metricts.. (Score:2)
Browser requirement checklist:
* Comes with the distribution repositories and is stable, maintainable and patched
* Has effective script control (white-listing, base-domain)
* Has effective ad blocking capability
* Does surf the web and performs adequately on my system
When the browsers have a check for all these features, than I will start to even consider these performance tests. Until then, there is not much choice except Firefox, ergo this is a comp
Memory hogs (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Hm, from my experience (when I give a chance for a ~month after every major release) FF is the only browser with built-in session restore which ISN'T PROPER (it corrupts its session file when it becomes "broken" (UI, reponsivness...) after heavy usage - btw, you do chceck its used memory after heavy usage, right? 100+ tabs? Few weeks running?)
Unscientific = useless. (Score:2)
'Like all our previous speed tests, this one is unscientific, [...]'
That's where I stopped reading TFS. Because it's now not only clear, but proven, that the whole point is, to pull out another "VS." story of useless dichotomy, to create page views.
Apropos: Who cares for some little speed difference? Any browser that hasn't got AdBlock, Greasemonkey, DownloadHelper, mouse gestures, TagSifter, (and for me FireBug and the Webdev toolbar), is not winning any contest anyway. ^^
Chrome dev version vs. FF/Opera release versions? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about Opera, but as far as I am aware, FF has preview versions 4.0 already. So if we're going to be testing the not-even-beta version of Chrome, isn't it fair comparison to do the same with the other browsers? I realize that TFA has results for FF 3.5.99 and a beta of Opera, but these are relegated to a less prominent position in the results...in contrast, Chrome's 4.x dev version is highlighted with the 2.x version is being downplayed in the results, and no mention is made of the (perhaps more relevant) Chrome 3.x beta. Not that I really care, it just seems like a bit of favouritism is playing into the presentation of this analysis...
My own anecdotal rating (Score:3, Interesting)
FF 3.5 is a crashy mess. I have NO plug ins. It regularly refuses to render a page. I click try again and BANG, it renders. I'm pretty sick of FF doing that. It also crashes a lot.
Opera works fine - its quick and has never crashed. I don't care for the UI much. It has a built in Torrent client, so I like using it in te background sometimes.
Chromes is not on the mac. Boo.
Camino is also lightweight but not super snappy, and sometimes things render completely wrong and ugly.
Safari sucks hairy donkey balls.
So, as a consequence, I tend to run FF or Camino. If Chrome was on the Mac, I'd certainly give it a solid run. I am very serious about FF's screw ups. It's very disappointing.
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There's a Chrome build in the dev branch for OS X. You can get it here:
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac
How about correcly rendered HTML? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't really care about speed, all browsers are pretty fast. The main issue I have with for example Opera is that it doesn't always render HTML correctly (even in 10 RTM), and sometimes hangs when you resize windows. I rather like a correctly rendered page which is done in 0.012ms than a badly rendered page which is rendered in 0.003ms
Which is the best car? (Score:3, Insightful)
These debates start to get sillier and sillier over time, or perhaps just more irrelevant. As the browsers' available features and performance exceeds what most people will veer use in practice, the "reviews" become a lot like reading Motor Trend or Car & Driver - which car has the coolest looks? Which car has the most massive supercharged 500 hp engine that will be mostly used driving to the local Starbucks?
Personal preference is of course valid, and perhaps the most valid metric - if you like something and you are happy with it, then there you go. Other than that, what I'm interested in these days is security and quality, and this "review" had jack on these topics. It basically was a typical fanboi-ish survey c. 2004 on which application has the biggest e-peen, and I just don't care anymore.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You're assuming they don't want to exaggerate the difference in results.
Re: (Score:2)
That actually sounds very useful for SEO.