4 ms·

What’s the Fastest Web Browser in the “Real World?” Chrome.

38 points by nathantross 15y ago

AshleysBrain 15y ago
Chrome is very fast and I do love it, but it still doesn't have a hardware accelerated HTML5 canvas. So if you open up a HTML5 game, IE and FF5 skip along nicely, but Chrome gets very choppy. I hope they fix this soon, because if your "real world" involves "playing HTML5 games", Chrome is one of the slowest! Edit: here's a little HTML5 "game", try it in IE9, FF5 and Chrome: http://www.scirra.com/labs/ghostshooterfullscreen/ http://www.scirra.com/labs/ghostshooterfullscreen/
Lucadg 15y ago
I find Chrome for Os X as being very "aggressive" with caching. Sometimes it's misleading as what I am seeing is not what I should see. That forces me to clear the cache more often than other browsers. I love the speed but start to wonder wether the price to pay is worth. I'm not even sure what I am saying makes any sense, does it?
- phreakhead 15y ago
  Yes! They cheat! Sometimes my internet connection will go out and all my tabs in Chrome lose their scrolling ability! It's like they just cached a bitmap of the page instead of the actual page itself.
rospaya 15y ago
Obligatory "what about Opera?"
- jarek 15y ago
  Don't be silly. Everyone knows the only use of Opera is lifting their age-old features and advertising them as revolutionary. - remembers 5.12
  - nathantross 15y ago
    Ofcourse, I do love the Opera app for iPhone, which is a lot faster then the Safari standard.
    - jamesgeck0 15y ago
      That's because Opera Mini isn't a normal browser. It's something like a thin client. Opera's servers do all the rendering and shoot things to your phone in a little binary file which the app just has to display. Opera Mobile and Opera Desktop are more conventional browsers.
      - falcolas 15y ago
        There is a "thick client" opera browser as well. Good browser.
- nawariata 15y ago
  Kinda cruel to do speed test and ignore browser which advertised itself as the fastest browser on Earth not so long ago.
guano___ 15y ago
So this benchmark measured "how the population actually experiences web browser performance", and the article pronounces Google Chrome as the obvious winner, with the slight sidenote that FF 5 has a faster "perceived render time"? It just seems slightly disingenuous.
- ootachi 15y ago
  Yeah, the title is really ridiculous here. Chrome won one metric; Firefox won the other. Mozilla has every right to cry foul.
- zobzu 15y ago
  Exactly. The title should be: What’s the Fastest Web Browser in the “Real World?” Firefox. But given the size of the images with the chrome logo its not a far fetch to figure out they're being paid by Google for this study. lol.
- mikeryan 15y ago
  Obviously Chrome is really the fastest. Firefox just seems the fastest ;-)
- Rusky 15y ago
  While Firefox does appear to render the page faster, it also seems to wait longer to start, so its page-loading experience is something like "......show." Chrome starts rendering sooner but takes longer to do it (probably as it waits for pieces of the page to load) so its experience for me is more like "...shoooow." I don't think it really matters either way, although Chrome 13's pre-rendering stuff often tips the balance that way.
palebluedot 15y ago
It would be interesting to see some additional data - for instance, the load & perceived render times for each browser under different operating systems - how is Safari on OS X vs Safari on Windows? Chrome & Firefox across Linux, Mac, and Windows? I imagine that Safari is predominantly on OS X, and IE on Windows. Does that affect the load and render times? I guess since the two fastest (Firefox & Chrome) are also on all platforms, and probably more equally distributed, that would suggest that the OS isn't as important - but without more information, that is just a guess.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
  Fx is consistently faster than Chromium on my Linux machines, while my roommate notices the inverse on his Windows machines. It's definitely partially OS-dependent.
btilly 15y ago
I'm curious about how much of this could be caused by the confounding influence of real world Chrome users being more technically savvy and therefore more likely to have good broadband connections.
- tybris 15y ago
  Is that true? My computer savvy friends are slow to switch from Firefox, because they've come to rely on certain plug-ins. My non-computer savvy relatives, who kept switching back to IE if I gave them Firefox, are all using Chrome.
wtallis 15y ago
And how much faster will page load times be with thorough blocking of ads and the kind of third-party scripts needed to gather this data? I'd bet even a halfway-decent ad blocker will make far more difference than choice of browser.
hugh4life 15y ago
"The second metric, perceived render time (green), refers to the amount of time it takes for the visible portion of the page to load in the browser. Again, Chrome did well here (2.374 seconds), but in this case, Firefox 5 did better (2.18 seconds)." I bet this gap gets larger the more tabs you add. Chrome starts choking after about 40-45 tabs... Firefox can handle 200 easy. The problem with Firefox is that "tab groups" function is horribly broken(as in, should not have been included yet) and that Tree Style Tabs just encourages opening hundreds of tabs.
- Que 15y ago
  Do you find it a normal use-case to have 40+ tabs open in a single browser window? I only ask because that seems like it becomes unusable ~20 tabs, maybe this is heavily subjective but I cannot maintain anywhere near that number of tabs in a single browser window.
  - rpearl 15y ago
    With tree-style tabs (a fantastic Firefox extension) opening large amounts of tabs becomes more common because you can manage different lines of thought, and everything else sort of collapses down. I commonly have about 100 tabs open.
    - Que 15y ago
      I could understand a tree-style view to help categorize, I will have to check that out as it sounds very nice. I was asking from a perspective of standard tabbed browsing that doesn't have a form of organization like this; IMHO under such circumstance so many tabs would be unmanageable or confusing at very best.
  - hugh4life 15y ago
    I rarely have fewer than 40 tabs open... I usually have about 80-110 but I would like to bring it down to about 60 or so though. Tree Style Tabs makes it easy to gather up tabs but when it comes time to delete them I hesitate or they're hidden under a top tree node where it would take too much time to clean it up. I think I just found an extension that could replace Tree Style Tabs. I was looking for something like this last month didn't see it. This puts the Tab Groups in the sidebar. . Pano: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pano/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pano/ https://github.com/teramako/Pano https://github.com/teramako/Pano What I like about this extension is that the tree would only allowed to get 1 level deep. With Tree Style Tabs, many tabs I don't want anymore can hide under a top tree node. Also, it looks like it will play well with Tab Mix Plus and I can keep the top tab bar.
ck2 15y ago
It's a cliche but we really do benefit from all the competition. Heck I am still on Firefox 3.6 and perfectly happy.
sp332 15y ago
I'm not sure how big a difference it really makes, but you can tweak the "perceived" render speed in FF by changing how long it waits between starting to get data and rendering the partial page. Go to "about:config" and add a new integer called "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" to something lower than the default of 250 (milliseconds).
Iaks 15y ago
I only know one thing for sure around this discussion: FF runs netflix without hitching on my 2008 macbook. Chrome drops frames about once a second and I get an un-watchable movie. This very well could be because of Silverlight, but I don't know enough of about the underlying connections between Silverlight and the browser to judge this. As an end-user the experience is still the same. I do, however, still use chrome for everything else. The unified search/url bar hooked me and I can't go back.

38 points by nathantross 15y ago

Chrome is very fast and I do love it, but it still doesn't have a hardware accelerated HTML5 canvas. So if you open up a HTML5 game, IE and FF5 skip along nicely, but Chrome gets very choppy. I hope they fix this soon, because if your "real world" involves "playing HTML5 games", Chrome is one of the slowest! Edit: here's a little HTML5 "game", try it in IE9, FF5 and Chrome: http://www.scirra.com/labs/ghostshooterfullscreen/ http://www.scirra.com/labs/ghostshooterfullscreen/

Lucadg 15y ago

I find Chrome for Os X as being very "aggressive" with caching. Sometimes it's misleading as what I am seeing is not what I should see. That forces me to clear the cache more often than other browsers. I love the speed but start to wonder wether the price to pay is worth. I'm not even sure what I am saying makes any sense, does it?

phreakhead 15y ago
Yes! They cheat! Sometimes my internet connection will go out and all my tabs in Chrome lose their scrolling ability! It's like they just cached a bitmap of the page instead of the actual page itself.

rospaya 15y ago

Obligatory "what about Opera?"

jarek 15y ago
Don't be silly. Everyone knows the only use of Opera is lifting their age-old features and advertising them as revolutionary. - remembers 5.12
- nathantross 15y ago
  Ofcourse, I do love the Opera app for iPhone, which is a lot faster then the Safari standard.
  - jamesgeck0 15y ago
    That's because Opera Mini isn't a normal browser. It's something like a thin client. Opera's servers do all the rendering and shoot things to your phone in a little binary file which the app just has to display. Opera Mobile and Opera Desktop are more conventional browsers.
    - falcolas 15y ago
      There is a "thick client" opera browser as well. Good browser.
nawariata 15y ago
Kinda cruel to do speed test and ignore browser which advertised itself as the fastest browser on Earth not so long ago.

guano___ 15y ago

So this benchmark measured "how the population actually experiences web browser performance", and the article pronounces Google Chrome as the obvious winner, with the slight sidenote that FF 5 has a faster "perceived render time"? It just seems slightly disingenuous.

ootachi 15y ago
Yeah, the title is really ridiculous here. Chrome won one metric; Firefox won the other. Mozilla has every right to cry foul.
zobzu 15y ago
Exactly. The title should be: What’s the Fastest Web Browser in the “Real World?” Firefox. But given the size of the images with the chrome logo its not a far fetch to figure out they're being paid by Google for this study. lol.
mikeryan 15y ago
Obviously Chrome is really the fastest. Firefox just seems the fastest ;-)
Rusky 15y ago
While Firefox does appear to render the page faster, it also seems to wait longer to start, so its page-loading experience is something like "......show." Chrome starts rendering sooner but takes longer to do it (probably as it waits for pieces of the page to load) so its experience for me is more like "...shoooow." I don't think it really matters either way, although Chrome 13's pre-rendering stuff often tips the balance that way.

palebluedot 15y ago

It would be interesting to see some additional data - for instance, the load & perceived render times for each browser under different operating systems - how is Safari on OS X vs Safari on Windows? Chrome & Firefox across Linux, Mac, and Windows? I imagine that Safari is predominantly on OS X, and IE on Windows. Does that affect the load and render times? I guess since the two fastest (Firefox & Chrome) are also on all platforms, and probably more equally distributed, that would suggest that the OS isn't as important - but without more information, that is just a guess.

MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
Fx is consistently faster than Chromium on my Linux machines, while my roommate notices the inverse on his Windows machines. It's definitely partially OS-dependent.

btilly 15y ago

I'm curious about how much of this could be caused by the confounding influence of real world Chrome users being more technically savvy and therefore more likely to have good broadband connections.

tybris 15y ago
Is that true? My computer savvy friends are slow to switch from Firefox, because they've come to rely on certain plug-ins. My non-computer savvy relatives, who kept switching back to IE if I gave them Firefox, are all using Chrome.

wtallis 15y ago

And how much faster will page load times be with thorough blocking of ads and the kind of third-party scripts needed to gather this data? I'd bet even a halfway-decent ad blocker will make far more difference than choice of browser.

hugh4life 15y ago

"The second metric, perceived render time (green), refers to the amount of time it takes for the visible portion of the page to load in the browser. Again, Chrome did well here (2.374 seconds), but in this case, Firefox 5 did better (2.18 seconds)." I bet this gap gets larger the more tabs you add. Chrome starts choking after about 40-45 tabs... Firefox can handle 200 easy. The problem with Firefox is that "tab groups" function is horribly broken(as in, should not have been included yet) and that Tree Style Tabs just encourages opening hundreds of tabs.

Que 15y ago
Do you find it a normal use-case to have 40+ tabs open in a single browser window? I only ask because that seems like it becomes unusable ~20 tabs, maybe this is heavily subjective but I cannot maintain anywhere near that number of tabs in a single browser window.
- rpearl 15y ago
  With tree-style tabs (a fantastic Firefox extension) opening large amounts of tabs becomes more common because you can manage different lines of thought, and everything else sort of collapses down. I commonly have about 100 tabs open.
  - Que 15y ago
    I could understand a tree-style view to help categorize, I will have to check that out as it sounds very nice. I was asking from a perspective of standard tabbed browsing that doesn't have a form of organization like this; IMHO under such circumstance so many tabs would be unmanageable or confusing at very best.
- hugh4life 15y ago
  I rarely have fewer than 40 tabs open... I usually have about 80-110 but I would like to bring it down to about 60 or so though. Tree Style Tabs makes it easy to gather up tabs but when it comes time to delete them I hesitate or they're hidden under a top tree node where it would take too much time to clean it up. I think I just found an extension that could replace Tree Style Tabs. I was looking for something like this last month didn't see it. This puts the Tab Groups in the sidebar. . Pano: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pano/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pano/ https://github.com/teramako/Pano https://github.com/teramako/Pano What I like about this extension is that the tree would only allowed to get 1 level deep. With Tree Style Tabs, many tabs I don't want anymore can hide under a top tree node. Also, it looks like it will play well with Tab Mix Plus and I can keep the top tab bar.

ck2 15y ago

It's a cliche but we really do benefit from all the competition. Heck I am still on Firefox 3.6 and perfectly happy.

sp332 15y ago

I'm not sure how big a difference it really makes, but you can tweak the "perceived" render speed in FF by changing how long it waits between starting to get data and rendering the partial page. Go to "about:config" and add a new integer called "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" to something lower than the default of 250 (milliseconds).

Iaks 15y ago

I only know one thing for sure around this discussion: FF runs netflix without hitching on my 2008 macbook. Chrome drops frames about once a second and I get an un-watchable movie. This very well could be because of Silverlight, but I don't know enough of about the underlying connections between Silverlight and the browser to judge this. As an end-user the experience is still the same. I do, however, still use chrome for everything else. The unified search/url bar hooked me and I can't go back.