Which browser is faster?
The other day while I was browsing through fatwallet, I came across a posting that gave information about Free Opera 8.02 version download.
As usual I have gone through the forum and started download the software. To my surprise, I came to know that Opera has comeup with many feature that are now being developed as add-ons for my favoirte web browser, Fire fox. I have installed and registered the Opera 8.02 browser for free. It has all nice features like multi tabs, authors view of page and many other user’s preference views, etc. The browser itself is pretty fast. Opera could not handle the style sheets as good as IE, Fire fox. What I have noticed with Fire fox is that it takes lot of time to switch / startup the application itself. Other than that I like everything about it. I also made a quick search on web to know the top browsers available till date. Some of the sofwares are completely differnt package and some work over internet explorer.
When have bunch of browsers available more or less with same features, I thought of conducting a small test on the some of highly rated browsers available from Download.com. This test is about how fast a browser can render, how much memory it takes up and how soon it will free the memory.
Test conducted while rendering html file of size: 28,394,312 bytes
Details about file: Shows 26,448 list of users’s first name, last name, email address and 3 check boxes in table layout
Generated using .NET Grid Control.
System Specifications:
Windows XP SP2
P4 1.7GHx
512 MB RAM
Page File Size: 768 Mb
For the first 4 mins 04 secs the Mem/vm ranged from 55K/66K-78K/75K after that it started shooting up and completed display in next 53 secs. Don’t know what did in first 4 mins.
Avant Browser took 6 secs to free Mem/VM from max values to 4,168K/276,448K. However, it did not clearup the memory any further even after 2 minutes of wait time.
So the conclusion is IE has faster load time, fire fox consumes less memory and clears it as soon as it can. Avant browser loaded faster compared Opera, however did NOT free memory even after long time.
Shyam
PS: These tests were conducted on the given processor information. Test results may vary and depends upon many other factors.
| Browser | Mem Usage(K) | VM Size(K) | Load Start | Load Complete | Time to load | Time to Free Mem |
| FireFox v1.0.6, | 248532 | 239608 | 9:57:40 | 10:00:05 | 02 mins 25 Secs | 5 Secs |
| IE 6.0.2900 | 285936 | 276116 | 10:13:35 | 10:14:15 | 0 mins 40 secs | 9 secs |
| Opera 8.02 | 292728 | 288792 | 10:18:00 | 10:22:57 | 4 mins 57 Secs | 7 secs |
| Avant Browser | 287100 | 276452 | 11:31:30 | 11:32:43 | 1 mins 13 secs | 6 secs (* did not free in full) |
– Shyam K. Arjarapu