Fast, Faster and Fastest Browsers

There are quite a lot testing and reviews happening out there and geeks are busy with comparing the web browsers again due to the launch of Google’s web browser. The overcrowded market of web browsers was not really expecting a web browser from Google and Google Chrome came in to the market as a surprise. Anyway, the question is why Google was this late?

In this article, let’s try to do a performance comparison between four browsers that we know; Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. When we consider the performance, we need to remember that all the browsers should be in the same status such as same toolbars or no toolbars installed, cache cleared, etc. There are so many users publishing their reviews and I’m not sure how many of them follow the standard guidelines for performance comparisons. If you just open the browsers in your computer and measure the startup times, I’m not sure you are doing a proper and accurate performance comparison.

Anyway, let me summarize what the users have seen so far related to these browsers in terms of performance. Chrome startup is now considered as the fastest and I assume this also depends on the hardware and the operating system configurations. Internet Explorer does a quite good job by starting up with a similar time or in a slightly less time. Firefox and Safari take a considerable amount of time for startup and it is almost 3 times as Chrome and IE.

Summarizing what people say about page load times, some claim that Chrome is the fastest of all. This statement has its flaws as you can expect a browser to be fastest for all the kinds of web pages available in internet. If you do a proper performance testing, then your sample of web pages should have a great diversity. One of those fair tests suggest that Chrome’s performance vary from fastest to slowest depending on what you throw at it. This is fair as Chrome is still at its beta stage and nothing more than this can be expected.

Google has used 1 million web pages as the test sample and there can be important web applications that they have missed. Surely they will perform and another few rounds of tunings based on the feedback received by beta tests.