Speed Testing The Latest Web Browsers


With the imminent release of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 being finalized this week, Lifehacker decided it was a good time to run the browsers head to head to see which was the fastest and least resource intensive. The testing system was a 2GHz 2GB Vista machine. The timing system used wasn’t directly hooked to the browser, so tests were repeated multiple times to improve accuracy. The cold start winner was Opera, but most browsers opened in about a second if they had been run recently. Safari did well loading content in multiple tabs at the same time, probably due to its short render times for JavaScript and CSS. The final test was memory usage; we’re sure many people will be happy to know that Firefox 3 RC3 only used 66% of the RAM required by the other three browsers.

10 thoughts on “Speed Testing The Latest Web Browsers

  1. ok, I was alright with hack-a-day getting away from the ‘daily’ part, but this isn’t even a hack! I do like this content, but not here! submit it to slashdot and keep hack-a-day free of this kind of stuff.

  2. I think it’s because it was posted on ‘lifehacker’, which has the word ‘hack’ in it, so they figured fair game to copy & paste here?

    Is there some way to subscribe to a RSS feed that only has the real hacks, and not the fluff added to try and get more pageviews/adviews/money?

  3. Yeah, I concur, I subscribe to lifehacker for these types of posts, and so will other people who enjoy them, but I do not subscribe to hack-a-day for these types of posts, and it’s getting a tad-bit annoying…

  4. (Sorry in advance James) I’m not trying to whine, just provide feedback: I have generally enjoyed the expansion of hackaday content, but I have to agree with Samuel that this is not really related to the general topic of hackaday. To me hackaday is generally about making or tweaking, or tools we can use to make/tweak, but the only vaguely useful information in the lifehacker post is the name of a stopwatch-like computer program for very unreliable performance testing. Big fan of the site in general, and support the expanded content, but I prefer expansion to different degrees of originality or skill within the core topic of hacking, rather than expansion to separate topics that hackers are usually interested in also.

  5. Has anyone else noticed that most of the people complaining about the content never seem to bother commenting when there’s a “real hack”?
    Maybe some of the posts aren’t totally relevant to them but it’s all still knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge is THE driving force behind true hackerdom.
    As a complete ham-fisted fool who can’t solder 2 wires together without burning his thumb I know I’ll never create a hardware hack worthy of posting but I love reading about them.
    Hackaday,especially now with the multiple postings, never fails to send me down totally new avenues of research in my pursuit of knowledge and for this I thank them.
    If you don’t like it just alt-f4 and stop boring us with your petulant whining.
    Have a nice (multi-hack filled) day :)

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