Browser Speed Comparison (Updated September 15 w/IE9 results)

I'll add others like SRWare Iron and Palemoon when the IE9 beta and Firefox 4 beta 6 come out. You'll notice I tried the nightly of Firefox, which apparently uses their new JaegerMonkey engine, but I think the monkey has had a little too much jaeger, because it crashed halfway through the test.

I also tried out the GPU accelerated rendering features in the Chromium but it didn't affect any of the scores so I left the results out.

Here are the graphs, separated into the individual tests, colors are based on the engine being used:



You can see that Opera jumps out to a huge lead here. Based on my own qualitative observation I'd say this is inflated. The test is also heavily DOM based, which Opera does excel at, so I wouldn't say its necessarily better at rendering.

Also of note is that IE9 is beating Firefox. Mozilla is going to have to work on that.



Once again Opera is in the lead, although I believe this is a minor test. The IE based browsers were noticeably slower, but the rest seemed pretty close to me.

It also seems that Firefox has shaken off it's previous embarrassment.



Complex graphics tests HTML5's Canvas. IE9 and Chromium both support GPU accelerated rendering, but it seems it wasn't used for these tests. I'm not sure whether this is a failing on the browsers or Futuremark.

Chromium offers a sizable boost over Chrome here, although it wasn't really noticeable. Chrome, Chromium and Opera all appeared roughly the same, with Firefox and IE9 roughly on par.

Its important to note that this test isn't taken into consideration for the final score, since IE8 doesn't support HTML5.




Holy crap what do we have here? Chrome seems to have a massive advantage here! Data tests the browser's ability to render large amounts of dynamically generated data.

Unlike the rendering test though I don't think this is that inflated. Despite Opera's apparent claim as the fastest web browser, Chrome still loads pages faster. With Opera I find you are often left with a noticeable pause on some web pages as you watch the elements counter tick up. I believe this may be the cause, as Opera actually does worse than Firefox here!




This test uses JQuery to test a bunch of DOM stuff. Basically it lets you add a whole bunch of complex and pretty effects to an otherwise static webpage (without HTML5)

While the previous test was all about raw throughput, this one is more of a complexity test, and yes, Opera is faster. There isn't much in the way of visual feedback here, but Opera flew through the tests.



This test is pretty simple. It tests string manipulation. Thinks like searching through strings, parsing, filtering etc... Honestly this is such a small part of the browsing experience that I don't even think you would notice a slowdown from IE8.



And there you have it, the "overall" standings. Personally I don't think this is an accurate reflection, since every test is weighted equally (they take a geometric mean). That means that text parsing is as important as data, which simply isn't the case. Also, complex graphics is omitted since we're all still bending over backwards for IE.


Even though Opera seemingly won the test, I wouldn't call them the winners.

I think ultimately it can be summed up in the DOM and data tests. Opera is incredibly fast when it comes to complex tests, but in terms of loading data rich websites its just plain slow. Slower than firefox!

The problems don't stop there though, since there also appear to be issues with the rendering itself. I went to upload the images in Opera, but it seems that imgur.com doesn't work right with Opera. Odd, because it works right in every other browser I've tested, including IE8.

But wait, theres more! Opera also messes with OCN. The borders are all off color, darker in some places, thicker and thinner in others. Were I to take a screenshot of Chrome and Firefox rendering the page they would be pixel for pixel identical, but not so with Opera. Even the layout sometimes breaks, with ads appearing the wrong place, stretching the fixed layout of the site.

It is for these reasons that I simply can't recommend Opera, despite it winning the test. For me, its no different than the 10.50 beta, fast, yet still broken. Its like a turbocharged IE8.


It will be interesting to see how IE9 and Firefox 4 ultimately impact these tests, but until then I would highly recommend Chrome/Chromium, but if you miss the theme support or addons then choose Firefox, because in terms of everyday browsing they are simply the fastest.