
Browser Shootout: IE vs. FF vs. Chrome vs. Safari vs. Opera - mcxx
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html
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jmillikin
I wish he'd include a margin of error, mean, and median in his graphs. Quotes
like this make me very leery of the reported result:

    
    
      Since this is a stopwatch test, the 0.3 seconds longer it takes Opera to open eight tabs than it does five could very well be human error.
    
      Load times for Yahoo! fluctuate in Safari by a full 100% during the tests. Beside the Facebook variation on all browsers, this is the most significant aberration during the page load time tests.
    
      The load times for Facebook fluctuate the most out of the Web sites tested during our page load time testing. This was experienced across all benchmarked browsers.

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Gatsky
I agree, these tests are quite useless. In addition to the points above:

1\. The huge variability in load times for various pages clearly depends much
more on the page being loaded rather than the browser.

2\. There is no discussion of what a meaningful test result might be. What
does it mean if one browser is 10milliseconds faster than another in an
artificial benchmark?

3\. Some of the browsers couldn't successfully complete the benchmark, but
were still included.

4\. The overall winner is determined by the number of wins in each category.
Internet explorer bombs on all the artificial bench marks, but loads real
pages quite well. Because there are only 5 page load tests and 13 benchmarks,
it loses badly. Honestly, which is more important?

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awa
My own computer never agrees with these benchmarks. For me IE starts up way
faster (2-3 secs) than Firefox (5+ secs).

Btw, does it annoy anybody else that to view the print version you need have
an account.

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nym
It annoys me more to have the ad follow me on the right hand side. I like
supporting ad-driven websites, but why not used position: fixed instead of a
bouncy JS animation?

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notauser
Position fixed doesn't work in IE6.

(But it's better to use it in browsers that support it, of course.)

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nym
Yes, but if you check out the site they don't just update the position to
mimic fixed, they "bounce" it into place.

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snagage
I'm not interested in many of the measurements done. \- Startup times: I
usually always have a browser window open and never shut it down \- Memory
footprint: Don't really care unless it leaks \- Rendering speed: I don't see a
whole lot difference between browsers and the margin of error in the tests
makes it difficult to come to any conclusions.

I use firefox and love it. It's consistent between different operating
systems, mature and most importantly has great plugins.

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chops
I've recently started using Chrome (for the first time seriously since it was
released) and I find it much snappier than Firefox, but there are two major
issues I take with Chrome.

1) The lack of slash searching, like vim, less, etc. I know about the type-
ahead extension, but it doesn't use the native search option that you'd get
with CTRL+F, or F3. / is the natural search key for me, and I find it
distracting to have to use CTRL+F to bring up the search. Furthermore, Google
employees have stated in support threads that they have no intentions of ever
allowing slash-searching, which I find rather disturbing:
[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=095c...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=095c2cee4deef464&hl=en)

2) When maximized the tabs at the top of the bar are bothering me, since I
keep a small Winamp window on the top of my screen. This interferes with
Chrome's tabs, and can be quite annoying (screenshot:
<http://sigmafiles.com/gulp/forum/16932/chrome_max.png> ).

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lotharbot
Conclusion: taken over a broad range of speed tests, Chrome narrowly edges
Opera. Safari is a solid third, Firefox a solid fourth, and IE is dead last.

But there's more to a browser than speed. While I'm currently using an older
version of Firefox, I love Chrome's homepage (showing your most-visited
sites). I love Opera's mouse gestures, too.

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trezor
While I do agree that Memory usage should be kept somewhat in check within
reasonable boundaries, what on earth is the problem with a browser using
available memory to accomplish speed and good response time?

I use Firefox myself and not Opera, but my work _laptop_ has 4GB of RAM and my
desktop at home has 12GBs of RAM. I don't want those to go wasted if they can
be put to good use.

For the memory test I'd actually rank it the opposite way, or just omit it all
together.

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postfuturist
Really, memory _leaks_ are the issue. I have created a web application that
needs to poll the server every few seconds. I've done everything I can to
prevent memory leaks, even using a pool of reused DOM objects. I ran it for
about 15 hours. At the end, Firefox 3.6 was using only 42 MB of memory while
IE 8 was using over 650 MB.

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roundsquare
Agreed, long term memory usage is what they should measure. Leave the browser
up for a while, come back, and compare the usage statistics.

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GrandMasterBirt
I am still surprised at how Firefox lags behind, as in the lack of progress
there. On Ubuntu 9.10 x64 firefox is horrifically slow. The only reason I
don't run chrome for everything is because I can't reload a single frame and
firebug is just uber better than chrome's kits.

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jpcx01
Agreed. Wild speculation, but I think the Firefox codebase might have hit
critical mass and its just too hard to manage it. I'm anticipating using
Chrome much more once webkit improves their dev tools to surpass firebug
(what's the hold up!?).

