Browser blowout: Which is fastest, most standards compliant?
The browser wars are back, not least due to hectic and ever shorter release schedules, just about every other week there seems to be some new build promising that it's the faster way to get around online.
But which browser really delivers the best performance? We decided to pit the leading contenders against each other in a gruelling set of benchmarks to figure out the truth for ourselves.
The field was made up of the latest versions of the five leading browsers: Chrome 12.0.742.122, Firefox 5.0.1, IE 9.0.8112.16421, Opera 11.50 and Safari 5.0.5. (Those speedy release schedules meant this selection became outdated even before the tests had completed, but more on that later.) We chose 16 benchmarks to cover every aspect of browser performance: startup time, page load time, rendering speeds, JavaScript and DOM operations, memory use, standards compliance and more.
