February 11, 2005

Browser Speed Study

Someone with a lot of time on their hands did a comprehensive survey of dozens of internet browsers on Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems. Opera seems to be the final winner on Windows and Linux. On the Mac, he recommends Opera and Safari 2, which will come out with OS X Tiger.

Personally I'm happy with Firefox on the Mac. First it's 100xs safer than browsing in Windows and it renders most websites nicely vs. Safari, which sometimes can't do certain sites properly.

Opera seems to be the fastest browser for windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice. However, it is still not as fast as Opera, and Opera also offers a high level of standards support, security and features.

On Linux, Konqueror is the fastest for starting and viewing basic pages on KDE, but as soon as script or images are involved, or you want to use the back or forward buttons, or if you use Gnome, Opera is a faster choice, even though on KDE it will take a few seconds longer to start. Mozilla and Firefox give an overall good performance, but their script, cache handling and image-based page speed still cannot compare with Opera.

On Mac OS X, Opera and Safari are both very fast, with Safari 2 being faster at starting and rendering CSS, but with Opera still being distinguishably faster for rendering tables, scripting and history (especially compared with the much slower Safari 1.2). Camino is fast to start, but then it joins its sisters Mozilla and Firefox further down the list. Neither Mozilla, Firefox nor IE perform very well on Mac, being generally slower than on other operating systems.