Web Browser Wednesday
We’ve been asked for quite awhile to provide a performance comparison of the different mainstream browsers out there, and so today we are going to show you the stats from several different areas that users generally find to be the most important. Things like memory usage, page load time, and JavaScript performance will all be covered below.
One thing that you need to remember with these tests is that the results are all relative to each other. Each browser is running on the exact same machine so that the comparisons are accurate. What we heard the last time we did tests like this is “such and such browser performed a lot better/worse for me.” We appreciate hearing what your results are, but for the sake of accuracy they can’t really be compared to what we get.
Notes:
- All of these tests are performed on the same Windows Vista SP1 machine, and is wired into a network to minimize the effects of wireless disturbances.
- To test both IE7 and IE8 Beta I ran all of the tests in IE 7, installed IE 8, and then reran all of tests again.
- All browsers started with a clean profile and no add-ons/extensions installed.
- Caches were cleared before each test was run.
- Only one browser was open at a time and no other applications (other than standard Vista services) were running.
- Internet Explorer 8 was always used in the native rendering mode (a.k.a. standards compliant mode).
–JavaScript Tests–
We’ve previously run Apple’s SunSpider JavaScript tests, but there was apparently some controversy of using that because people felt that it could be a little biased. We wanted to pick a test that used tools you’ll find in sites you visit everyday. That’s why we went with the MooTools SlickSpeed test which checks the browser against different JavaScript libraries: Dojo 1.0.2, JQuery 1.2.3, MooTools 1.2B2, and Prototype 1.6.0.2.
Many sites use those libraries, and even we use JQuery for things such as the AJAX commenting. By putting the browsers back-to-back with the SlickSpeed test, we’ll be able to find out exactly which ones will give us the better JavaScript performance (this is what really matters on a day to day basis).
Pretty much none of the browsers were able to complete all of the tests error-free, and so we’re focusing purely on the speed. We ran each test three times, totaled the runtime (measured in milliseconds) for all four libraries, and then averaged the results. In the parenthesis you’ll see the results of each test we ran before averaging them together (the overall smaller number is better):
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