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Many people choose their web browsers based on speed and performance over all other considerations. To that end we have benchmarked some of the most popular web browsers to help people choose. We ran these browsers through three different set of tests. The Sun Spider JavaScript test, the Acid 3 standards test, and the new Futuremark Peacekeeper set of tests.
The benchmarks were run on a variety of different machines with fairly similar hardware and different operating systems ranging from Windows XP to Windows 7. Each test was run three times and the average of all three was taken as the score.
Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a web browser follows certain selected elements from web standards, especially relating to the Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript. The higher the score, the more standards compliant the web browser is. Out of the browsers tested, IE8 scored the lowest with a 20/100. Ie9 scored better with an 83/100. Surprisingly Firefox 3.6 scored only 94 and Firefox 4 Beta scored a 97. The other browsers (Chrome, Safari, Opera) all scored 100 on the Acid 3 test.
The Sunspider JavaScript test is a benchmark suite that aims to measure JavaScript performance on tasks that are relevant to the current and near future use of JavaScript in the real world. Examples of this are things such as encryption and text manipulation. Lower scores on this test are better than higher scores. The winner of this test is Chrome, although Opera comes in a close second. Safari is a not too distant third and IE9 surprisingly came in fourth. Firefox 4 shows a marked improvement over Firefox 3.6, but both came in a surprising fourth and fifth. I had higher expectations for Firefox. IE8, not surprising, came in last by a huge gap.
Peacekeeper measures your browser's performance by testing its JavaScript functionality. Peacekeeper scores are measured in operations per second or rendered frames per second depending on the test. With Peacekeeper, higher scores are better. For this suite of tests, Opera and Chrome are neck and neck. Chrome is slightly better with a score of 4771 compared to Opera’s 4707. Safari came in a distant third with a score of 2865. Firefox 4 and 3.6 came in fourth and fifth with scores of 2480 and 2174 respectively. IE9 scored more than three times better than IE8 with a score of 1825 to IE8s 595.
In conclusion, It’s Geektime rates these browsers from best to worst in terms of raw performance; Google Chrome, Opera, Apple Safari, Firefox 4 beta, Firefox 3.6, Internet Explorer 9 preview, and lastly Internet Explorer 8. Google has put a lot of effort into making Chrome blazing fast, and it shows. Opera claims to be the fastest browser around, while this isn’t true, its close. Safari being a contender is no surprise as it is based off of the same Webkit rendering engine that Chrome is. Firefox being near the back of the pack is surprising. Internet explorer being dead last is most definitely not surprising. Internet Explorer 8 is showing its age by posting such horrible scores in every single test. These tests only test raw performance, mostly in JavaScript applications, and do not reflect any other features of the browsers.
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