Web Browser Speed Test: Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Camino

December 4th, 2009 admin

Screen shot 2009-12-04 at 11.11.55 AMAh, yes, web browsers. There are lots to choose from, but which one is right for you? We went ahead and downloaded 5 web browsers. We then tested their speeds for several different websites. Why didn’t we test Internet Explorer 8? While we really do like IE8, we mainly wanted to test non-”standard” browsers. In other words, we wanted to test browsers that don’t normally come with an OS. Safari does come with Mac OS X, but not in Windows, so that’s why we tested Safari. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, are all available for Windows and Mac OS X. Camino is Mac OS X only.

We tested 10 different websites with 5 runs each using WebWait, a nice little website that can calculate the time it takes to load a website a number of given times/intervals. You may be saying to yourself that this website isn’t accurate. Well, we think it is, so that’s what we used.

Here’s exactly how we did the testing. We tested each browser one-by-one. We started with Safari, and then used Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Camino. Noted was the file size of each browser. Next, a acid3 test was taken. We then began the speed tests with WebWait.

Tested were 10 different websites:

  1. Google.com
  2. Yahoo.com
  3. MSN.com
  4. Apple.com
  5. Microsoft.com
  6. Gumballtech.com
  7. YouTbe.com
  8. Facebook.com
  9. Bing.com
  10. Wikipedia.org

We tested one website at a time. There were 5 runs for each website, with a 5 second delay in between each run. Each time for each pass was recorded and averaged. This was done throughout all 5 browsers.

The results were somewhat surprising. Below are the results. You can download the original Excel worksheet (.xlsx) here.

Browser-Speed-TestYou can see that Chrome has won most of the tests. It actually doubled Firefox’s score. Safari and Opera were tied, and Camino was just bad. Maybe it had the swine flu?

So there you go! Chrome is the winner. It is now my primary browser. My previous primary browser was Firefox. Sure, you don’t get all the fancy plugins, but who needs them anyway? Certainly not me! Chrome is fast, stable, lightweight, and has themes.

Posted in Apple Tags: , ,
«
»
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Pingback: Web Browser Speed Test: Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Camino … Mobile Browsers

  • Pingback: Web Browser Speed Test: Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Camino … Google Chrome

  • Pingback: Podcast, Ep. 001 – Google Wave/Chrome/OS, Ramp Champ, SEGA, & your user questions | Gumball Tech Talk Podcast

  • Pingback: Google Chrome Finally on the Mac & Linux | Sync Blog

  • http://devyn.heroku.com/ Devyn

    Actually, extensions are already in Chromium, so they’ll be coming to Chrome pretty soon. I’m almost certain the beta version has them.

  • http://devyn.heroku.com Devyn

    Actually, extensions are already in Chromium, so they’ll be coming to Chrome pretty soon. I’m almost certain the beta version has them.

  • http://gumballtech.com/ brian

    No extensions for the Mac OS X version :( … Yet.

  • http://gumballtech.com brian

    No extensions for the Mac OS X version :( … Yet.

  • Pingback: Gambling

  • Karl

    The JavaScrip engines are compared and tested online on http://www.speed-battle.com. Shows record holder for each set of browser and OS.

  • http://www.lovelydenver.com/denver-hotels denver hotels

    If you like the Top Sites page, you can make it your default by going to Safari, Preferences and then looking at the General preferences. Select Top Sites in either “New windows open with” or “New tabs open with” or both.

  • http://www.instepjoggingstroller.com/instep-bicycle-trailor instep bicycle trailor

    FasterFox, by the way of its working as a browser, has increased the amount of processing power and the way the browser sends the page request per second to get the web page contents to be displayed in the browser.

  • Anonymous

    Chrome is really one of the great browser to use. And this one is absolute the great information about the speed of those. And I am also using Google Chrome. And the second thing, WebWait is truly looking just awesome site to know about this one. The regarding information of this post really makes me crazy about it. Thanks for sharing some fabulous information of this one.