Web Browser Grand Prix: The Top Five, Tested And Ranked

[fsjis1]

[citation][nom]manwell999[/nom]Chrome has a clumsy system to open bookmarks. Instead of a pull down menu you have to click a spanner then select bookmark manager which opens up a bookmark browser so you can then click the frequently used site.[/citation]

There is a fix for this problem take a look here

 

[Guest]

I always use Opera, fast and easy to use, very practical!!! and sometimes Chrome. Ditched Firefox long ago for Chrome. IE... i use it to updtate my OS, nothing more.

 

[saint19]

Very good, always Google once step to the ahead.

 

[Guest]

I'm a Opera fan - because of its features and not because of its speed- so ignore my comments if they seem too biased or more rant than facts.

Opera loses out on the memory test but as far as I see using more memory would only help the application if other applications are not using it.
But if other applications have to use the computer you should check the memory usage when the browser is "minimised".
Please check this for yourselves but for me the memory of Opera consistently drops down to less than 20 , yes 20 mb when it is minimized from 450(maximized).
The behaviour of Opera can be explained in dromaeo if you count the fact that it tests runs per second. If a javascript runs even once currently Opera is the only one which caches the compilation. So things are not compiled again and again. But it loses out on tests where things run only once where it is comparable to other browsers(waiting for code to compile, then running the compiled code.) I'm not sure about this explanation but as a programmer I can assert how much time compilation can take.

 

[Gin Fushicho]

So more or less , pick anything other then IE unless you only use facebook and or Yahoo!.

Okay...

 

[amko_sa]

Opera is the best of the best forever.I am using 5 years.

 

[Guest]

i usually have about 20-40 tabs open on my 2 T60p workhorse running 32 bit XP SP3 with 2 GB RAM. I have 35 tabs open in firefox 3.6 while i'm writing this comment and it's using 375 MB. Keep in mind that i'm using greasemonkey with 10 ikariam scripts in the background. I would be using 750 MB in Chrome. I can't see myself using a browser that eats double the memory than firefox unless you have 6GB+. So for me Ophera and Chrome don't count as long as their memory usage is not on par with Firefox.

 

[theguy82]

I have awful memory leaks with Firefox 3.6. I never had this before, but after I did a clean install of Windows 7 64bit, my memory usage for Firefox climbs around 800-900mb. I barely have any plugins either. Anyone else care to share their concern / solution for this?
I might just try another browser.

 

[itadakimasu]

Firefox been slacking... Crashed on me twice today and it doesn't play some youtube videos right away. Goto IE w\ the same video's and they play instantly.

 

[victomofreality]

Chrome FTW. Not a big surprise though this seems to be the consensus of all the reviews I've read on this.

 

[Supertrek32]

[citation][nom]jsowoc[/nom]I found that extension not to block most of the ads. Google makes a lot of money off ads, so I can't see their adblock being functional anytime soon.[/citation]
There's a few major differences between Chrome and Firefox adblocks, but that's not a factor.

1) It's independently developed, and uses the same block-list as firefox.
2) It's currently beta, so not all items are being properly blocked yet.
3) Due to the way chrome handles extensions, ads are still downloaded and loaded then hidden, so you'll sometimes see the ad for a quarter-second. This is supposed to be fixed at a later date.

 

[psmcardle]

I compared Chrome side-by-side with IE and found that they were almost identical in speed with chrome seeming slightly faster. The one disapointing aspect of chrome is when you navigate back to a previous page. Chrome would always return to the top of the page where IE always returned to where you left from. Maybe it's a setting I couldn't find but this was really annoying. I'll stick with IE for now as it does everything I need it to do.

 

[jeffredo]

Always thought Opera 10.5 felt pokey loading web pages compared to Firefox and Chrome. This review confirms it.

 

[Proximon]

I only took exception to the memory test. Using more memory might be a good thing ya know.

Otherwise I felt this was a very solid effort at a complex subject. Kudos to mitch074 for writing the response that saved me much time.

 

[puddleglum]

I would also be interested in a Linux review using the most common Linux browsers. I currently use Epiphany on my Gentoo box -- mainly because Firefox is so sloooooooooow there. It would be interesting to see which Gnome/KDE friendly browsers are the snappiest.

 

[Tomtompiper]

I have switched to windows and tried to replicate the startup time for one tab for Firefox. It was doing it in less than 2 secs on Linux, but that was 3.5. On Windows with 3.6 I cant get it to go over 3 secs. Has anybody else tried this. I know it's not the same set up, I'm running Vista, not a new install. An E6300 with 2gb ram and a 1650 ATI, so this old rig should be slower if anything. Can people give it a try and post their times, there is something fishy going on. It might have to do with net speed, but I'm on a crappy wireless conection so no advantage there.

 

[Guest]

So much happier with Chrome vs IE. My computer doesn't rev up like a jet engine when visiting a site with heavy Flash content. Also, with IE, I would regularly get a message saying that it needed to close due to bad content - and it would close every tab and every browser window! With Chrome I got one such message so far, and it didn't close even a single tab.

 

[Tomtompiper]

I would be interested in which boxes were checked on the Google homepage, I assume it was http://www.google.com/ig as opposed to http://www.google.co.uk/ or similar local page? I have checked both on this machine with FF 3.6 and IE8 and here IE8 is loading faster than FF 3.6
There is a lack of reciprocity here.

 

[Guest]

Unfortunately, the memory usage benchmarks seem very VERY far from "real world". 1, 5 and 10 tabs? Right now I have ~40 open in Firefox, and that might well climb to 70 or 80. Firefox handles this just fine.
Chrome unfortunately chews up 30Mb or so *per tab* - presumably the downside of the process separation. I find Chrome brilliant if you want to quickly go online and look something up, and I use it now and then for this kind of thing.

But my *real* browser - the one I always have open, the one containing all the pages I'm working on, the references I'm coding from, the news sites I plan to read at lunch later, and so on - will stay as Firefox. Chrome just dies under the load, certainly with "only" 4Gb of RAM.

Aside from that, the superior customisation options of Firefox would win it for me, though Chrome is certainly improving in this area.

 

[Guest]

Really should have included memory usage OVER TIME, and specifically, with streaming content. Firefox wins on memory usage? Uh. No.

 

[matt87_50]

meh, I'll take twice the memory usage for faster response. what's 150meg when you have 2gig in a net book?

also, see how they calculated the winner there? thats THE PROPER way to calculate a winner from such data! not just total up the amount of places completely disregarding the priority of the place! CANADA WON THE WINTER OLYMPICS! NOT THE U.S.! I mean wtf? a bronze is worth as much as a gold!?!?

 

[1kpc]

IE8 requires a high performance machine to work. At my work, I have a company provided average config notebook. Chrome works well on it but not IE. At home I have an overclocked i7 desktop, with lots of RAM. On this machine, I've been using IE8 for quite a while and to me it never fails. Compared to the chrome at work, this browser is equally fast and it is so for all kinds of webpages. I don't feel the need to go by the benchmarks if it is not affecting the user experience. I guess they are not targeted to measure the user experience and nothing else.

Practically speaking I can give the fairest comparison between chrome and IE because I use them everyday. I go to the same websites on the two browsers. Granted IE8 wouldn't work with the low processing power of an average notebook. But, for a good machine switching over to chrome has no real advantage. On the downside, I wouldn't be able to enjoy the websites which are rendered perfectly well on IE only. This for me is extremely annoying if I open something and it crashes the browser or not rendered properly ..!!!!!

 

[1kpc]

Its funny that after posting the comment above chrome is showing the confirmation page is garbled with blackened translucent filtering of the comments on this page and buttons like "submit my comment" and "feedback", etc. floating all over the place of the webpage. Its kinda hard to describe this error.

 

[omnimodis78]

[citation][nom]mitch074[/nom]"...scenarii...?[/citation]

I liked what you had to say, and gave you a thumbs up, but dude, "scenarii"? Sometimes when people want to come off smart they actually come off the opposite...

From Wikipedia: "From scenario, the terminal o having been replaced with an i to form its plural, as per the Italian -o → -i pattern for forming plurals, by analogy with concerti and virtuosi. However, the plural of the Italian word scenario is scenari, making “scenarii” etymologically inconsistent."

 

[Guest]

Several comments.

"less memory use is good" should be qualified. For a 2MB machine like used in your test ($50 of memory, a 2006 spec machine), your browser is still using 3% of memory in the system. I believe your test should have qualified the results: I want my browser to use *more* memory if it means higher speed and responsiveness, not less. Today, most of my memory is going spare anyway - use it, browser!

For your test environment, you don't specify the network you're running on. For a US-dweller, I run on a very fast network (I've trialed all the providers at my home, and chose Comcast over Uverse because Comcast has 13ms latency and Uverse has 23ms latency, at the same throughput). I have solid measured rates above 20Mb/sec, and call my provider if a test ever dips below 15mb/sec. Most US users have 6Mb/sec at best, and at work, often 1.5Mb to 6Mb is shared among many users. I also use a combination of Google's DNS service and another DNS service, not the default for my provider. I trialed all those, too.

We know Chrome aggressively pre-caches content and DNS requests, and likely had different thread tuning. These changes will give different results depending on your connection to the Internet. I would expect a European user with high last-mile bandwidth but large lag to the US to have even a different experience. These effects aren't minimal! And, if you're paying per-bit (like tethered over a cell connection) pre-caching might be a serious problem.