Web Browser Grand Prix: Chrome 18, Firefox 11, Windows XP

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Status
Not open for further replies.

arnweb

Distinguished
Mar 12, 2010
8
0
18,510
Firefox was released 2 years after XP and Chrome was released 7 years after XP release. But Opera was released on 1996. Definitely, Opera was and is best browser for XP. In 2001, I experienced Opera when there was no other browser yet (Firefox, Chrome, Safari).
And in my opinion, most innovated browser is Opera and other browsers imitate its features.

 

spotify95

Distinguished
Oct 1, 2011
52
2
18,635
Hey, how comes that, in the comments, everyone who talks about Chrome is getting the thumbs down? Its not all bad, and although Opera did win, Chrome was only a 1/2 point behind. I have used Opera before, but it messed up my settings for default browser etc, and I could not download anything else, so I had to uninstall Opera. But I might give it a shot soon.
For now, it is Chrome, Safari and Firefox for me. IE only when I have to. Opera will be installed again soon.
 
G

Guest

Guest
An interesting attempt. I believe more studies like that should be made.

Yet, the current results are close to meaningless:
- the results are not statistically significant - running it 5 times is a joke; 300 or even 3000 would be a better number (especially since there's network IO)
- the experiment should be run in an controlled environment (e.g. recorded IO and stimulation of network traffic, disabling turbo, etc) - the time differences cited are neglectable when there is network IO; this being said I believe the data for cashed pages is more reliable the one for non cashed pages
- what is the list of pages used for the study? And how well does it approximate usage behavior?

Study criticism aside, I believe some analysis of the data would also be useful.
Would you prefer Sandboxing and high security (e.g. Chrome, and Firefox to some extent) or would you ignore sandboxing for a gain of 1/10 (arbitrarily chosen) of a second in load time and expose yourself to a large number of attacks (e.g. Opera)?
 

srap

Honorable
Feb 24, 2012
99
0
10,630
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]Tom's has already done that. They might do another one later.[/citation]
would you link it, 'cause I can't find it.
 

calc-yolatuh

Distinguished
Mar 10, 2010
8
0
18,510
CORRECTION: Opera still can be run in Win98. A great browser for retro gamers. http://kernelex.sourceforge.net/wiki/Opera Additionally, check this from a couple years ago: http://my.opera.com/hellspork/albums/showpic.dml?album=875612&picture=11984306 In similar fashion it is a common choice of browser in Tiny Core Linux due to minimal library dependencies.

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1301892 You can set navigation mode to restart the frozen memory image of a page when pressing Back, with no actual loading or DOM cascade needed.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Thanks blazorthon! I hope they do a new one using the Galaxy Nexus.
 

spotify95

Distinguished
Oct 1, 2011
52
2
18,635
[citation][nom]yolav0412[/nom]Since browsing the Web is one of the only modern tasks such a system is capable of, more often than not the issue usually has something to do with "the Internet being slow."[/citation]This is correct, our internet is a bit slow, even Chrome is sometimes slow on my old laptop (about 6 years old, Win XP) but internet connection speed will affect all browsers equally. This makes IE8 even slower than before. In fact, I tried CSS Mazesolver on IE8 and had to give up after 1 minute, because otherwise it would have maxed out my CPU and crashed the computer.
 

h3llas

Honorable
May 26, 2012
1
0
10,510
Margin would be even higher, if other browsers did not borrowed certain functionalities and ideas from Opera. Opera is true pioneer in browser world.
 

brightsmith

Honorable
Mar 7, 2012
31
0
10,530
From almost every test, Chrome became the fastest, but how fast is actually in real world scenario? For example, I access internet every day more than 12 hours through PC, read and archive many "heavy" articles, download a lot of videos, visit sites with lots of advertisements over and over again, and test a lot of web design. So, the web browser which is best for me? Until now, I still use Firefox, because I'm used to, there are add-on that meets those needs, cache management up to 1024 MB, and customizable toolbar. All these things have not been able to be provided perfectly by other web browsers. I hope from next article "Web Browser Grand Prix" can provide a complete picture of the real world scenario, where every web browser to compete with one another using their full potential (add-on, custom aggresive configuration, slow internet connection), instead of just a bunch of test results.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.