Internet Browsers: Fight!

After the Firefox3 beta 4 review in March, I have started to use FF3 since that day, now most of my time browsing through with the recent FF3 beta 5 (refer here to find out how to disable the add-ons/plugins compatibility on FF3 beta so that you may use the FF2 plugins). Anyhow, I am still using Opera to surf, and do feel that it loads much faster on certain sites.

However, recently ZDnet compiles an in-depth comparison on Safari, Firefox, IE and Opera and the sumary as below:

PS: Timings in milliseconds: shorter bars are better.

According to the study, Safari is undoubtedly one of the fastest browsers available, even if iBench 5.0 delivers slightly optimistic scores (the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark does not seem to be affected). Under both Mac OS X 10.5.2 and Windows Vista SP1, Apple’s browser is a front-runner.

PS: Timings in milliseconds: shorter bars are better.

The worst-performing browser in our tests is Internet Explorer 7 — The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, in particular, shows up the deficiencies of Microsoft’s current browser. Things may change with Internet Explorer 8, as the first beta version shows a significant performance improvement. However, the competition is not standing still, with new versions of Firefox (3) and Opera (9.5) closer to release than IE 8.

PS: Click to enlarge, timings in milliseconds: shorter bars are better.

Overall, and taking the performance of the beta versions into consideration, the browser performance rankings are as follows: Firefox and Safari in a clear lead ahead of Opera and finally Internet Explorer. Firefox 3, due in June, promises very good performance and efficient memory usage. No browser used less memory to open multiple sites than the Beta 5 version of Firefox 3, and only a few sites failed to display correctly. Safari and Opera, however, are more likely to exhibit incompatibilities.

PS: Timings in milliseconds: shorter bars are better.

These tests show that when it comes to browser performance, there’s plenty of scope for improvement. In some tests, they observed speed boosts of the order of 100 per cent between the current version and the latest beta.

So what do you think? ^^P

Don't bother the posts below, but if you are free, why not?

1. Your browser password manager is compromised?
2. IE still the king
3. Less than 2/3 of users have fully patched browsers
4. Preview of upcoming Opera Mini amps up your mobile
5. New browser on the block : Flock 1.0.3