Browser Shootout: IE vs. FF vs. Chrome vs. Safari vs. Opera

I wish he'd include a margin of error, mean, and median in his graphs. Quotes like this make me very leery of the reported result:<p><pre><code> Since this is a stopwatch test, the 0.3 seconds longer it takes Opera to open eight tabs than it does five could very well be human error. Load times for Yahoo! fluctuate in Safari by a full 100% during the tests. Beside the Facebook variation on all browsers, this is the most significant aberration during the page load time tests. The load times for Facebook fluctuate the most out of the Web sites tested during our page load time testing. This was experienced across all benchmarked browsers.</code></pre>

My own computer never agrees with these benchmarks. For me IE starts up way faster (2-3 secs) than Firefox (5+ secs).<p>Btw, does it annoy anybody else that to view the print version you need have an account.

I'm not interested in many of the measurements done. - Startup times: I usually always have a browser window open and never shut it down - Memory footprint: Don't really care unless it leaks - Rendering speed: I don't see a whole lot difference between browsers and the margin of error in the tests makes it difficult to come to any conclusions.<p>I use firefox and love it. It's consistent between different operating systems, mature and most importantly has great plugins.

I've recently started using Chrome (for the first time seriously since it was released) and I find it much snappier than Firefox, but there are two major issues I take with Chrome.<p>1) The lack of slash searching, like vim, less, etc. I know about the type-ahead extension, but it doesn't use the native search option that you'd get with CTRL+F, or F3. / is the natural search key for me, and I find it distracting to have to use CTRL+F to bring up the search. Furthermore, Google employees have stated in support threads that they have no intentions of ever allowing slash-searching, which I find rather disturbing: <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=095c2cee4deef464&#38;hl=en" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=095c...</a><p>2) When maximized the tabs at the top of the bar are bothering me, since I keep a small Winamp window on the top of my screen. This interferes with Chrome's tabs, and can be quite annoying (screenshot: <a href="http://sigmafiles.com/gulp/forum/16932/chrome_max.png" rel="nofollow">http://sigmafiles.com/gulp/forum/16932/chrome_max.png</a> ).

Conclusion: taken over a broad range of speed tests, Chrome narrowly edges Opera. Safari is a solid third, Firefox a solid fourth, and IE is dead last.<p>But there's more to a browser than speed. While I'm currently using an older version of Firefox, I love Chrome's homepage (showing your most-visited sites). I love Opera's mouse gestures, too.

While I do agree that Memory usage should be kept somewhat in check within reasonable boundaries, what on earth is the problem with a browser using available memory to accomplish speed and good response time?<p>I use Firefox myself and not Opera, but my work <i>laptop</i> has 4GB of RAM and my desktop at home has 12GBs of RAM. I don't want those to go wasted if they can be put to good use.<p>For the memory test I'd actually rank it the opposite way, or just omit it all together.

I am still surprised at how Firefox lags behind, as in the lack of progress there. On Ubuntu 9.10 x64 firefox is horrifically slow. The only reason I don't run chrome for everything is because I can't reload a single frame and firebug is just uber better than chrome's kits.