Five Web Browsers: Which is the Fastest?

[Rob Williams]

Your PC might be fast, but what about your Web browser? That's right... Web browser. It might seem mundane at first, but there can be stark performance differences between one browser and the next, and after pitting the five most popular options on the market - in both stable and nightly formats - the results might surprise you.

You can take a look at our performance data and then discuss the results here!

 

[TheCrimsonStar]

I always use Chrome. Looks cool and never had any issues with it.

 

[orthancstone]

Love Chrome so much at this point. I keep Firefox around for web testing and certain addons, but Chrome has turned into my go to browser for general surfing.

 

[Greg King]

I haven't been able to get into chrome at all. I have given it a go a few times in the past and just cant seem to move away from Firefox.

 

[Brett Thomas]

Gotta say, I'm a Chrome user myself. I could never quite get used to Opera, I'm not sure why. I like Firefox, too, but I've just become very used to the way that Chrome "feels" for lack of a better word. I also really appreciate the low memory footprint, which is one thing our tests DON'T cover.

 

[prage]

I'm surprised that the test includes Kraken and leaves out Sunspider. Mozilla clearly made Kraken to make Firefox look fast after all the bad press, just like Chrome designed the V8 benchmark just for Chrome.

Mozilla claims that Kraken is more "real", but they all claim that!

Gotta say, I'm a Chrome user myself. I could never quite get used to Opera, I'm not sure why. I like Firefox, too, but I've just become very used to the way that Chrome "feels" for lack of a better word. I also really appreciate the low memory footprint, which is one thing our tests DON'T cover.

Chrome has anything but a low memory footprint, considering its separate process per tab approach...

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Yeah, I've got to agree, Chrome's memory footprint is one of the highest, partly why it's so fast. Firefox has a much lower footprint, in fact, one of the lowest, still need to confirm it with IE, but the problem with IE is that it can hide a lot of it's memory in resident Windows applications and DLL's. I checked a while ago, Firefox with 20 tabs took up about 300MB + 340MB virtual, Chrome for the same tabs took up 1.3GB... and I can't remember the VM. I should do some testing to double check, I have a new clean install of Win7, so I can better compare without plugin's.

I still like Firefox with all its plugins, but I'm slowly moving to Chrome because of the speed, and the fact that it has all but a handful of plugins which I use regularly makes it easier. Still looking forward to the official launch of Firefox 4 though, there's a lot of interesting tweaks, and the new Tab grouping looks useful. I would use the beta, but past experience with FF betas left a bitter taste due to crashes and trying to remove them after.

I really should give Opera a serious look, it's actually one of two browsers I have never installed or used, the other being Safari, but Safari is another matter, I don't like the way Apple bundles Safari, Quicktime and iTunes all together.

 

[Rob Williams]

I'm a Chrome user as well, having moved from Firefox a couple of months ago after being tired with the lack of performance and stability. Chrome is lightweight, and fast. It's far from perfect, but it's about as perfect as it gets for me.

One thing I found odd during testing is that Opera is the -fastest- browser out there, but it also has the lowest market share by far. It almost seems like Opera needs to figure out why that's the case. Of course, performance isn't everything. I refuse to use Opera on a personal basis just because I don't like the company (petty as it may be).

I'm surprised that the test includes Kraken and leaves out Sunspider. Mozilla clearly made Kraken to make Firefox look fast after all the bad press, just like Chrome designed the V8 benchmark just for Chrome.

To be honest, this is the first such article we've written and I pretty well just dived in. I knew about Sunspider, but I also knew that Kraken was supposed to be <em>like</em> Sunspider, but just with some additions. Perhaps that's not the case, and judging by what you said, that seems to be so.

I don't think this will be the last such article I'll be doing, so I'll include Sunspider in the future, and would be happy to consider anything else you might find to be worthy of inclusion.

I also agree on Chrome's memory footprint... I am pretty sure it's the worst. But it's because of that memory footprint that it remains super fast.

 

[Unregistered]

Has to be Opera

Any serious surfer will already be a long-term Opera user, simply because they introduce the innovations that people take for granted today years before anyone else.

The fact that Opera also competes on speed, feature-set, security and is easily the most conservative in memory terms, and also the most widespread in platform support terms is just an added bonus.

Why compromise your privacy by using Chrome, when Opera offers everything Chrome offers, and so much more (like Mail/Chat/News/RSS/Bittorrent and more).

The usual excuse is of course because some heard once that Opera does not have AdBlock+ or NoScript. Both of which of course are utter crap, as Opera has both of these built in, no extensions needed.

The problem is, too many people are too lazy to look elsewhere other than the top 2 or 3 browsers, or simply believe the cherry picked truth the American bloggers love to pass on.

 

[Unregistered]

Browser Marketshare

Browser quality and marketshare have no relation whatsoever. Some of the best things in life don't have the best marketshare. My Ferrari is awesome, but I heard they don't sell as many of them as they do Toyotas.

Opera trumps all the other browsers in pretty much every respect. I don't care that other people don't use it. I know that I am getting the best browsing experience bar none, the best security, bar none, the best features bar none. That's all that matters to me. Let the dumb fanboys fight it out.

 

[Rob Williams]

No offense, but you sound like Opera PR. Most Opera fans I've come across have been rather passionate about their browser of choice, though, and there's nothing really wrong with that. There's no browser I could rave about in the same manner, because I find brutal faults with all of them.

Even though I don't like the browser (or the company... that European Microsoft debacle <em>really</em> rubbed me the wrong way), I agree 100% that other browsers lift features from it willy nilly. During testing, my jaw dropped when I saw how many aesthetic cues Firefox 4.0 had taken from Opera... all the way down to the top-left menu button.

Browser quality and marketshare have no relation whatsoever. Some of the best things in life don't have the best marketshare. My Ferrari is awesome, but I heard they don't sell as many of them as they do Toyotas.

That's a poor comparison. <em>Anyone</em> has access to any one of these browsers, while only a select few could choose a Ferrari over a Toyota. Do you really think that if Ferraris were as easily acquirable, they'd still be rare? I don't think so. I use Linux, which has a drop-in-the-bucket marketshare, but I sure don't think it's the best OS around.

Browsers are free to download, and the fact that Google's Chrome rose to popularity so quickly pretty much states that Opera is doing something wrong. It could be with marketing, I don't know. What I do know is that for years, I absolutely loathed the layout and default features of the browser. It seemed to be more bloated than anything else I ever used, and I found some features to be counter-intuitive. I am not talking about like five years ago, but just last year when I last gave it a go.

In testing the browser for this article, I could see that things changed a bit, because I wasn't looking at a bloated-looking piece of software, but a slimmer one... on par with what I'd expect to see from Firefox. For that reason alone I'd personally be more interested in trying out the browser again, but I still plan to stick to Chrome. It suits me well enough, and since I use Linux and know how to use a computer, security features don't matter a great deal to me.

 

[orthancstone]

Why compromise your privacy by using Chrome, when Opera offers everything Chrome offers, and so much more (like Mail/Chat/News/RSS/Bittorrent and more).

Having not checked on Opera in a long time, I'm unfamiliar at the moment with its options for installation. So take that into account when reading the following statement.

I see those extraneous features (Mail and Bittorrent especially) as bloat that I don't want in the first place, hence why I try to avoid getting attached to a browser that's cramming extra features down my throat. Frankly it just reminds me of the monster that Netscape Navigator turned into many years ago. What a giant turd that browser ended up being in later versions.

 

[Optix]

My work PC is garbage. It's a dated, slow, dirty P4 so I am always looking for ways to speed it up so I can do what I need to do without twiddling my thumbs waiting for pages to load. One day a few weeks back I grabbed Firefox, Chrome and Opera. What's listed in this review is spot on from what I experienced although I did not have the stop watch ready.

Well done.

I'll probably make the change over to Opera at home based on what I experienced so look out Rob! ZOMGOPERAWTF!

 

[Rob Williams]

For interest's sake, I decided to check out browser usage shares for readers of our website, and over the course of the past 30 days, those were...

Mozilla Firefox - 46.57%
Internet Explorer - 23.41%
Google Chrome - 19.48%
Opera - 5.13%
Apple Safari - 4.22%

The rest is divided amongs all of the other browsers, including mobile. Internet Explorer has seen a major drop in usage over the past couple of years.

 

[Doomsday]

how can ppl use IE is beyond my teeny brain!

 

[s14shyam]

The transition

I´ve long been an Opera fan-boy, but I gave Safari 5 one look, and it´s reader feature just pulled me in, but I wasn´t resistless. I didn´t like many of the other characteristics of Safari, especially the closed testing part. So I went in search of another capable browser with that feature, and I hit Chrome... Call me anything, but I think my love for Opera just didn´t let me do anything, but I think, over time, the Reader feature has appealed more to me that I am currently writing this comment from Chrome ! Anyway, I don think Iĺl not be using Opera within an hour, after reading that article. Though I´ve known about browser speeds for ages, this article just called in the Opera fire raging inside of me ! Whatever be whatever, it all turns out to be the love you have for your fav browser. I love Opera more that at least a million things in this world. In other words, There are only two things that I love more than Opera !!! So, all this speed gimmicks, I dare not call it so, but still, don´t play even the most trivial part in my, and most people´s decisions. Of course that isn to say that this article was futile... Actually, these are the fuels that keep the browser wars raging, and I like to rate the article ´Good´ for a first start ( after having read hundreds of such article in the WWW ). PS - This is my first visit to this site. I was directed here by one of Operaś blog posts. And this is one place where Opera scores big. It connects intimately with each of its users, or at least with me,and do remember that I know the meaning of ´intimate´.

 

[Unregistered]

Nice work there on the article, there's always the first time

A bit on the Opera: I guess the reason behind its low popularity hides in its history. Although the browser is not even close to the bloated mess it used to be only a few years ago, the internet still remembers it as such, and thus the market share. The marketing team isn't really doing good job at changing the imago either: at one point, they advertise its minimalistic UI, at the other the ton of features it has – these are kind of opposites. I switched to Opera a year ago because I wanted my browsers on different computers to be in sync, which could be done with opera in breeze, I've never used built in mail or torrent clients (who does?) and I don't think they're even installed in the browser.

The other reason must be the fact that it's currently the only (?) browser developed outside US (maybe they should market it this way). Most of the tech/internet-related journalism comes from the states, so it's not hard to see the connection there. Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but…

In the end I'm just happy that IE is finally getting its guts together and that there's a browser for anyone, not just 2 to pick from

 

[Unregistered]

Another Opera lover here , its the UI I love the most you can easily make it look how you want.
If you want the address bar on the bottom of the screen no problem.
It has the best range of Keyboard shortcuts of any browser & as for being bloated its only a 10 MB download.
Opera might have too many options to appeal to the masses but if you spend the time to learn how it works
you can really make it sing.
Opera is a must for power users.

 

[Rob Williams]

Though I´ve known about browser speeds for ages, this article just called in the Opera fire raging inside of me !

Haha, that's some browser passion, right there

I agree with you 100% that not everyone is going to love the same browser, and while Opera offers a bucketload of good things, other browsers offer a lot of good things as well. For me, I choose Chrome just because its lightweight and fairly stable. It's far from bloated, and I guess since I use no extensions at all, my needs are quite simple. Reliability, lightweightedness and speed are very important to me.

A bit on the Opera: I guess the reason behind its low popularity hides in its history.

You make a LOT of good points here. I was talking to a friend about this yesterday, and we came to some similar conclusions, especially with regards to the marketing. The main issue that I see is that there just doesn't seem to be much in way of marketing at all, although I could be wrong. I see ads for Chrome all over, but none for Opera (to be fair, Google has a -major- advantage by being able to advertise Chrome on its homepage).

I think Opera's history has a lot working against it. Some people today even still think that Opera is a paid browser, for example, and like you said, people who haven't actually tested it out in a while might believe it's still bloated, when in fact things seem to have changed quite a bit.

I'm not sure that the development country matters too much though. Opera after all has a great presence where mobile browsers are concerned. It's just the desktop side of things were its reach is a bit lacking. It's amazing, too, because I find Opera fans to be the most vocal browser fans out there. Yet for some reason, the browser can't seem to grasp a notable share of the market. I'm not entirely sure that will change unless things change with how Opera promotes itself.

Opera is a must for power users.

Kougar (Robert Tanner) on our staff is a devout Opera user as well and pretty much sums up the same reasons to explain why he uses it. With regards to being bloated though, people don't usually mean file size when saying that, but the number of features included. I want a browser that's lightweight, not one that includes an e-mail client, torrent client, et cetera.

 

[mrd]

I´ve long been an Opera fan-boy, but I gave Safari 5 one look, and it´s reader feature just pulled me in, but I wasn´t resistless. I didn´t like many of the other characteristics of Safari, especially the closed testing part. So I went in search of another capable browser with that feature, and I hit Chrome... Call me anything, but I think my love for Opera just didn´t let me do anything, but I think, over time, the Reader feature has appealed more to me that I am currently writing this comment from Chrome ! .

You can actually go install Arc90 Readability (where Apple acquired the functionality from in Safari) as a bookmarklet in most browsers including Opera if you wish.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/