Web Browser Grand Prix: Chrome 20, Opera 12, Firefox 13

[adamovera]

How do the latest Windows 7-based Web browsers stack up? Chrome and Firefox each have three wins under this operating system; can one become our champion? Or will Opera clean house here, as it did under Windows XP? We set up a new test system to find out.

Web Browser Grand Prix: Chrome 20, Opera 12, Firefox 13 : Read more

 

[mayankleoboy1]

1.what the benchmarks dont show is that in Firefox , if a tab has a heavy page with a lot of CPU intensive workload, the complete browser UI starts stuttering. That means the browser UI is on the same thread as the page loading.

2. in the 40 tab test, try working in a tab during the loading of the 40 tabs. you will find lots of difference between browsers. FF hangs, Opera and Chrome remain fluid.

3. how about a test where a browser is using 1GB+ RAM and you are trying to open/close tabs. Then see the UI responsiveness. most browsers can easily handle 800MB RAM. but which browser easily handles 1.2GB+ RAM ?

 

[mayankleoboy1]

IE9 does so good on HTML5 HWA accelerated benchmarks because its able to offload more of the processing to the GPU.

i tested this and found that during a HTML5 benchmark, IE9 had the least CPU usage, and most GPU usage amongst all the browsers.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

How many firefox users dont use ADblockPlus ? very very less.Also ABP developer is a regular contributor to the Firefox source code.
maybe you should do a few memory benchmarks with ABP installed just to realistically judge what 99.99% of FF users go through.

 

[ben850]

WTF Chrome is already on 20?? It ninja updated to 19 just a few days ago..

 

[lethalsam]

i won't ever use a browser a browser WITHOUT AD BLOCK Plus. (ABP)

ABP works wonderful on Firefox, i RARELY see any ad. While I have used ABP on Chrome BUT its doesn't block half the ads.
I know its Not Google's fault, its just that ABP developers are putting more effort with Firefox.

So for me, Firefox > Chrome.

 

[adamovera]

@mayankleoboy1: 1+2) Interesting, I'll be looking for that next time 3) That would require a different workload for each browser.
[citation]IE9 does so good on HTML5 HWA accelerated benchmarks because its able to offload more of the processing to the GPU. i tested this and found that during a HTML5 benchmark, IE9 had the least CPU usage, and most GPU usage amongst all the browsers.[/citation]
Really interesting, what utility do you use for measuring GPU usage?
[citation]How many firefox users dont use ADblockPlus ? very very less.Also ABP developer is a regular contributor to the Firefox source code.maybe you should do a few memory benchmarks with ABP installed just to realistically judge what 99.99% of FF users go through.[/citation]
I'd estimate ABP usage on FF at around 5% or less based on ABP and FF usage statistics. Besides, that would give FF an unfair advantage.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

Really interesting, what utility do you use for measuring GPU usage?

MSI afterburner for GPU. windows task manager for CPU.

@mayankleoboy1: 1+2) Interesting, I'll be looking for that next time

i sent a mail regarding this to Chris. but maybe i sent it too late for this article...

 

[mayankleoboy1]

if you open multiple tabs together in chrome, it can use each CPU core for each tab. so if you have a quad core, and you open 4+ tabs together, the CPU usage will be 100% (using all 4 cores) during the tab loading time.
but if you run 4 instance of dromaeo in 4 tabs, the CPU usage is still 25% (using only 1 core).
so chrome is not completely multiprocessing.

in IE10 beta, if you run 4 instances of dromaeo benchmark in 4 tabs, it uses all the for cores. so we can expect better multiprocessing from IE10 and win8

 

[adamovera]

@mayankleoboy1: I got that email yesterday or the day before, this article was completed a few days before that. Sorry, my inbox usually gets a few pages deep after a doing long benchmark-heavy article.
Is Dromaeo (the DOM portion) working in Chrome for you? I could not get it to finish in Chrome or Safari on any of my Windows machines.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

i ran the javascript benchmark that ran fine. Didnt run the DOM benches.

BTW, i run chrome dev version. so that could make a difference.

 

[Regor245]

I have Both Chrome and Firefox.

I still prefer Firefox since it has more features and i like it's features.

I disabled Smooth Scrolling to make it more responsive.

I just hate random freezes/stutter sometimes and some problem on Youtube while watching,
when you scroll up/down, the youtube screen is messed (Glitch).

By the way, ABP user here too.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

when you scroll up/down, the youtube screen is messed (Glitch).

thats a flash issue. disable the protected mode of falsh.

 

[princesiddiqui]

Fire Fox 14.8 has been announced, version 13 is old version.

 

[Memnarchon]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]IE9 does so good on HTML5 HWA accelerated benchmarks because its able to offload more of the processing to the GPU.

i tested this and found that during a HTML5 benchmark, IE9 had the least CPU usage, and most GPU usage amongst all the browsers.[/citation]

+1.
IE9 uses also a lot more GPU Memory than Chrome. I am listening to internet radio when I am playing games and I found that a single tab from IE9 (opened for more than an hour) uses 150MB VRAM oO. Now this amount is not significant for some users but for most users that have 1024MB VRAM and doing the same thing like me (or have open tabs and alt-tabing during games) while playing at 1920x1080/1200 might cause fps drops.

 

[jerm1027]

Why is Firefox 13 on here? Firefox 14 has been out for a little while (even on Android), and it's support for SPDY may very affect the results. Just saying.

 

[s3anister]

[citation][nom]lethalsam[/nom]i won't ever use a browser a browser WITHOUT AD BLOCK Plus. (ABP)ABP works wonderful on Firefox, i RARELY see any ad. While I have used ABP on Chrome BUT its doesn't block half the ads.I know its Not Google's fault, its just that ABP developers are putting more effort with Firefox.So for me, Firefox > Chrome.[/citation]
Chrome has Adblock, just to let you know. But personally I prefer Firefox Aurora with Adblock Plus, anyway. I couldn't imagine using a browser that didn't have any version of Adblock on it, though; it'd be torture.

 

[PreferLinux]

Has anyone ever investigated why the MS Maze Solver is so slow on Firefox? It almost has to be a FF bug that hasn't been fixed rather than just that FF is slow at CSS3 when the difference between FF and everything else is so huge, and also that FF does very well in CSS2.

 

[s3anister]

[citation][nom]princesiddiqui[/nom]Fire Fox 14.8 has been announced, version 13 is old version.[/citation]
[citation][nom]jerm1027[/nom]Why is Firefox 13 on here? Firefox 14 has been out for a little while (even on Android), and it's support for SPDY may very affect the results. Just saying.[/citation]
13.0.1 is the latest stable release. I'm using version 15.0a2 of Firefox, but it's a moot point in any browser competition because it's not a release version.

 

[PreferLinux]

[citation][nom]jerm1027[/nom]Why is Firefox 13 on here? Firefox 14 has been out for a little while (even on Android), and it's support for SPDY may very affect the results. Just saying.[/citation]
Where? Not here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html

 

[jerm1027]

[citation][nom]s3anister[/nom]13.0.1 is the latest stable release. I'm using version 15.0a2 of Firefox, but it's a moot point in any browser competition because it's not a release version.[/citation]
i stand corrected. I'm not sure how i got mixed up.

However, I'm not sure how Silverlight takes importance over WebGL or HTML5 in this test. >~

 

[s3anister]

[citation][nom]jerm1027[/nom]i stand corrected. I'm not sure how i got mixed up.However, I'm not sure how Silverlight takes importance over WebGL or HTML5 in this test. >~[/citation]
lol I know Silverlight is a dying Microsoft technology, anyway.

Personally, I'd actually like to see browser alpha/beta competition haha

 

[mayankleoboy1]

[citation][nom]PreferLinux[/nom]Has anyone ever investigated why the MS Maze Solver is so slow on Firefox? It almost has to be a FF bug that hasn't been fixed rather than just that FF is slow at CSS3 when the difference between FF and everything else is so huge, and also that FF does very well in CSS2.[/citation]

its a known bug. what FF does is, it redraws the entire scene again after every change in the CSS. Hence its so slow.
unfortunately, the devs are not actively working to improve performance in this specific case. it will be corrected as a side-effect of other related bugs.

 

[Chetou]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]1.what the benchmarks dont show is that in Firefox , if a tab has a heavy page with a lot of CPU intensive workload, the complete browser UI starts stuttering. That means the browser UI is on the same thread as the page loading.2. in the 40 tab test, try working in a tab during the loading of the 40 tabs. you will find lots of difference between browsers. FF hangs, Opera and Chrome remain fluid. 3. how about a test where a browser is using 1GB+ RAM and you are trying to open/close tabs. Then see the UI responsiveness. most browsers can easily handle 800MB RAM. but which browser easily handles 1.2GB+ RAM ?[/citation]

This!!! Firefox has some real problems when it gets over 1+ GB RAM usage and real life performance and responsiveness is really lacking. Opera is in a different league. I still prefer Firefox for its unrivaled customization options, but it is a pain to use it heavily, especially on slower machines.

 

[wheredahoodat]

"If you never open more than five or ten content-heavy websites at the same time, you should never base your browser choice on memory consumption. It simply doesn't matter a lot if your browser consumes 50, 200, or 400 MB of RAM, even on lower-end machines. However, heavy tab multitaskers should steer clear of IE9, Chrome (in all its incarnations), and Opera (Beta). Just go with Firefox. With RAM levels quickly reaching 1 GB with just 15 tabs, you'll encounter sluggishness even on faster machines. Again, it simply doesn't matter if you've got 4, 8, or 16 GB of RAM -- a browser taking up 1 to 1.5 GB of RAM quickly reaches the limits of both the Windows' and its own memory management capabilities. Threads and handles run wild, paging starts kicking in, and overall reliability goes down with responsiveness.

Firefox is the clear winner of the bunch. It was the only browser that did not slow things down and I recommended it for both lower-end mobile devices and high-end desktops. "

http://www.itworld.com/software/266362/whats-fastest-browser-maybe-youre-measuring-wrong?page=0,2