Web Browser Grand Prix: Chrome 25, Firefox 19, And IE10

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]Safari is also Webkit. It doesn't work like Chrome. Opera going to Webkit doesn't mean Opera being a clone of Chrome.[/citation]
[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]+1Actually, if you get a little deeper into Safari and Chrome development, you will find that "Webkit" is not completely open source! Some portions of it are held as closed source by BOTH Apple (no surprises, huh?) and Google (surprise!) . So the Webkit of Safari != Webkit of Chrome. Its more like there is an Apple Webkit, and there is a Google Webkit.Really, Firefox is the only True Open Source Browser.[/citation]
If the initial version of the new Opera is clearly just another spin of Chromium with a twist (e.g. Maxthon, Rockmelt, Comodo, etc.) than I see no reason to keep running it - experience has shown that such browsers can only hope to match Chrome. On the other hand, if they really punch it up in some way (like Dolphin with its new Jetpack HTML5 engine), we'll most definitely keep it. Can't say for sure one way or another at this point in time, but from what little we know, it is very possible that Opera will become another mini-Chrome with an untestable gimmick of some kind, in which case there's no point in keeping it in the running.
Opera did say Chromium specifically, not simply WebKit, and Chromium means the WebKit rendering engine and the V8 JavaScript engine. Safari uses WebKit with a different JS engine, and AFAIK, it uses a newer version of the rendering engine as well.

Far enough. If Opera does turn out like that and gets kicked out as a result, can it be replaced with Lunascape? Lunascape isn't just another clone, but rather it's own browser AFAIK and it can be fairly interesting. I've noticed that it is beyond an extreme when it comes to RAM efficiency and it even has some unique UI concepts and huge amounts of settings for customization.

I also agree with one of the earlier posts that it'd be interesting to read a WBGP sort of article with fully tricked out browsers like how many of us use them. Throw in a few performance, security, privacy, and ad-block add-ons and set them up, that kind of thing. For example, for Firefox, I'll use No-Script, a customized Fasterfox, some Adblock (IDR which one, it's probably Plus), and Ghostery and I'll do something similar for Comodo Dragon (untestable gimmick or not, it still has a somewhat higher level of customization settings than Chrome does). What do you think of that?

 

[programit]

Firefox has improved in speed but I stopped using firefox due to their compatibility problems. And the constant upgrades that break everything. At least chrome upgrades quietly and maintains compatibility with addons etc.
Memory usage these days isn't a big deal on most systems. I run 8 to 16 gig on all computers now so a couple of hundred MB is nothing.
Also Chrome seems by far the smoothest operation on Windows 8 and at least Google are reasonably open regarding what is tracked etc. Not like some other companies.
IE 10 is just as bad as IE 9 in comparison. On windows 8 it is painful to use due to incompatibilities and speed. Its only there to access some Microsoft sites!
Its still a 2 horse race!

 

[fkr]

^ So what do you do with the 600MB spare RAM ? Put it in a showcase for everyone to see and admire ?

I have 16 gigs of ram the the post I made was a copy paste. my whole rig is passing $1500 in cost. but I just figured I may help somebody with my last post

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]caspy7[/nom]@mayankleoboy1#2, incorrect, they have said they're going with Chromium's V8.@alidanMozilla saw the err of their ways and got after memory. The most recent version of Firefox should beat version 10 in both memory and performance. The last benchmarks I saw had it beating all the other browsers in memory usage as well. (In this article you can see a snapshot of this in the "40 tabs" graphic. Like many techies, this is more what my browsing looks like.)[/citation]

i lean more tward 40 tabs open in chrome and about 400+ in firefox
yea, i use the browsers wrong, and should probably close things, but i forget about them allot, so if i dont keep things open i lose stuff i want to keep up with.

[citation][nom]srap[/nom]Because if it switches to webkit, all of it's test results will be identical to Chrome's, or it will hardly differ.Firefox 15: HueyFix, details here.@alidan: FF17 ESR would be more safe than FF10, and even better with memory.Edit: I hate how it keeps deleting the links.[/citation]

defiantly looking into something more recent now.

 

[v0vets]

You should enable HWA in Opera manually and retest!! Opera has this features (HWA and WebGL) disabled by default!!! I've enabled it - and tests run fine.

 

[butremor]

So, it appears that Chrome is a go-to browser now?

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]i wish we could get some older browsers in here to to see the difference newerones make. i personally am still on ff10, memory is really the reason i use fire fox, along with chrome. i would love to see how older versions stack up to newer ones.[/citation]

That i really want to see! I hope to see an update with older browsers!

 

[fkr]

i wish you guys would posts the links to all of the testing software you use. I have run a few of the same tests as you guys and my scores are considerably higher. i run a i5 2500k OC and a gtx 560. It would just be nice if us readers could use the same software as you and know we are running the same tests also. I know some of these are pay applications but some are free, also the tests you run can be difficult to know exactly which ones you run when you only run part of a DOM suite for example.

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]Wait a minute... firefox 19? It was little over a year ago that version 4.0 came out?! So its really version 4.18? right?[/citation]

What is 1-bit users?

 

[alidan]

ok, i just got ff18, most recent 64bit waterfox compile...

ok, what the hell happened...
its useing on average 60% of the cpu, up to 90%
and even when i have less than 60 tabs loaded up, the thing is borderline un usable...
seriously chrome is less of a hassle than that...
to top it off, when all the tabs i want are loaded, 18 uses more ram than 10, plus makes almost everything unusable due to cpu usage... im trying to figure out exactly what the hell is wrong, but i don't have high hopes.

 

[blazorthon]

ok, i just got ff18, most recent 64bit waterfox compile...

ok, what the hell happened...
its useing on average 60% of the cpu, up to 90%
and even when i have less than 60 tabs loaded up, the thing is borderline un usable...
seriously chrome is less of a hassle than that...
to top it off, when all the tabs i want are loaded, 18 uses more ram than 10, plus makes almost everything unusable due to cpu usage... im trying to figure out exactly what the hell is wrong, but i don't have high hopes.

I just updated my Chrome browser- can't even get it to work right with a lot of the Java code here at Tom's, so I had to keep using an older version! My point is that just because you had a better experience with Chrome doesn't mean that Chrome is over-all better for it. That was just one person's experience in a single, very specific situation. Even if a hundred people shared that issue, it'd still be minuscule. I'm not trying to offend not hate on Chrome nor Firefox, just to put things into perspective.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]I just updated my Chrome browser- can't even get it to work right with a lot of the Java code here at Tom's, so I had to keep using an older version! My point is that just because you had a better experience with Chrome doesn't mean that Chrome is over-all better for it. That was just one person's experience in a single, very specific situation. Even if a hundred people shared that issue, it'd still be minuscule. I'm not trying to offend not hate on Chrome nor Firefox, just to put things into perspective.[/citation]

oh god no, chrome i cant open many tabs because it will cause a bluescreen,

but firefox is coming close to if not exceeding chrome in ram usage... and i cant figure out why... i disabled a crapton of extentions because i really just use firefox ans an overflow browser (keep a tab open, and not worry about it, and to remember to read something but not actively read it) so i got rid of everything that i use to have on it for when it was my main browser.

apparently i disabled something (either flash or silverlight) and it went from 17+ idle with 3 tabs open down to an average of 5 or less idle... i haven't tried putting a load on it yet, but i just managed to get it to acceptable cpu useage.

with that said, i still am not getting email updates for when i comment... nothing in email, and nothing in spam either...

as for the chrome issue... i suggest a regedit to make chrome not auto update, and when you see chrome added something that you really would like, than update it on your terms... i had to do that because chrome would decide to restart itself and i had pages that were 404ed open to read later before i closed it...

 

[mayankleoboy1]

^ For Firefox , test on a clean profile.

either run firefox --p or waterfox --p from windows run prompt.

Open the page where you experience lag. If you dont see a lag, most probably some addon you had was causing problems.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]^ For Firefox , test on a clean profile.either run firefox --p or waterfox --p from windows run prompt.Open the page where you experience lag. If you dont see a lag, most probably some addon you had was causing problems.[/citation]

from what i can tell it was either silverlight or shockwave flash, because after them and a few of the extentions i gutted that i dont need, it hovers less than 5% and 0 most of the time, even with a large ammount of tabs open... granted it still uses more ram than i would like...

 

[mayankleoboy1]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]^ For Firefox , test on a clean profile.either run firefox --p or waterfox --p from windows run prompt.Open the page where you experience lag. If you dont see a lag, most probably some addon you had was causing problems.[/citation]

from what i can tell it was either silverlight or shockwave flash, because after them and a few of the extentions i gutted that i dont need, it hovers less than 5% and 0 most of the time, even with a large ammount of tabs open... granted it still uses more ram than i would like...

If you dont need Silverlight, better to keep it disabled, and enable only when watching Netflix. Enabling addons is restartless. For the same reason, keep the Java addon disabled.

 

[folem]

I slightly disagree with the memory benchmark. I don't remember the last time my browser went down to 1 tab for an extended period of time unless I was turning off my computer. I think a better option would be to go down to 1 or 2 tabs and then back up to 20 to 40 different tabs. Doing this I usually find Firefox 18 and 19 to have a slight edge over Chrome.

I also think that measures of processor usage need to be added. If I am trying to do multiple things at a time Firefox doesn't get in the way, maxing out at about 15% usage, while Chrome can make it up to almost 80 on a complicated page.

 

[GarciaL]

Your Firefox peacekeeper results are really odd...
I have the following results with my i7-2600k on Windows 7 :

IE 10 -> 2786
Firefox 19 -> 2837

Firefox 19 behaves a lot better than in your test.

 

[GarciaL]

[citation][nom]programit[/nom]Also Chrome seems by far the smoothest operation on Windows 8 and at least Google are reasonably open regarding what is tracked etc. Not like some other companies.[/citation]
Thanks for the laugh, "Google are reasonably open regarding what is tracked" yeah that's a good one. Made my day ^^.

 

[campdude]

Now I know which Browser should go on my Dieing labtop.

 

[nickul]

I'm sorry but i'm gonna have to call BS on some of the tests here.. When you start with "Ironically, it's IE9....", you start thinking that the author has, from the start, something against IE. You also start paying attention to all the charts shown, and realize that it's quite impossible to happen that IE does best in the individual tests charts (shown very small, shhh!...), but in the composite score charts, Chrome comes up the best (see Memory).
Also, you can not possibly say that IE has next to 0 score on Hardware Acceleration Performance composite chart, while chrome and ff have a trillion points each! You've included webgl in that test, and i suppose IE doesn't have support for that just yet. Bad for IE, but you still can not say that, when in real life IE beats the carp out of chrome and ff in many hw acceleration related scenarios.

I am no expert, and i may very well be wrong, but:

Sir, I do believe that your whole article was bias.

 

[blazorthon]

I'm sorry but i'm gonna have to call BS on some of the tests here.. When you start with "Ironically, it's IE9....", you start thinking that the author has, from the start, something against IE. You also start paying attention to all the charts shown, and realize that it's quite impossible to happen that IE does best in the individual tests charts (shown very small, shhh!...), but in the composite score charts, Chrome comes up the best (see Memory).
Also, you can not possibly say that IE has next to 0 score on Hardware Acceleration Performance composite chart, while chrome and ff have a trillion points each! You've included webgl in that test, and i suppose IE doesn't have support for that just yet. Bad for IE, but you still can not say that, when in real life IE beats the carp out of chrome and ff in many hw acceleration related scenarios.

I am no expert, and i may very well be wrong, but:

Sir, I do believe that your whole article was bias.

LOL, the joke was that IE9 kicked the crap out of IE10 in cold start up time. There was nothing against IE9 which, as I recall, was awarded by Tom's to be the first IE browser that could at least compete with the others quite well. Furthermore, IE only won in a few of the tests. It lost overall because it lost in most tests and many of its losses were huge. There was no bias.

Also, if you're referring to how IE won a lot in the singles memory testing, it's only fair to mention how horribly they (at least IE10, not so much IE9) did in displaying pages without errors. When half of the pages are displayed with errors, how quickly the pages are displayed doesn't matter too much.

 

[Aris1978]

You should consider including Maxthon in those tests. It's a great browser which rapidly receives recognition and popularity and it performs at least equal to all others.

 

[Mowa Khalid]

Pls consider using maxthon too, and for god's sake enable webgl, hw acc. in opera.

 

[RobAC]

The funny thing is the only time I use Chrome is to login to Tom's !

Otherwise Waterfox is my default browser. I've got too many blocking extensions that go crazy when I try to load Tom's and they prevent the site from loading, Even plain vanilla IE10 causes issues for me too on this site.

 

[blazorthon]

The funny thing is the only time I use Chrome is to login to Tom's !

Otherwise Waterfox is my default browser. I've got too many blocking extensions that go crazy when I try to load Tom's and they prevent the site from loading, Even plain vanilla IE10 causes issues for me too on this site.

Tom's is consistently the buggiest site that I visit regularly no matter what browser I use