I have been a fan of Firefox and i got a slight shock today when i came across the fact that Google Chrome is the fastest browser while my favorite Firefox 3.5 grabbed the second position. Even though the Firefox team claimed to come out with the fastest browser when they were releasing the Firefox 3.5 but it seems they missed on few things that Google implemented successfully in Google Chrome.
According to detail tests carried out by PC World, the average page opening time for Google Chrome tested against ten websites is 1.699 while the average page opening time for Firefox is 1.762, a close second. The other competitors including Internet Explorer 8 and Safari 4 gave an average page opening time of 1.833 seconds and 1.964 seconds respectively. The worst thing is that Opera 10 beta took the last position in the ranking.
Anyways, i am still going to stick with the Firefox since the difference between Google Chrome and Firefox 3.5 was not big enough to convince me to change my web browser.
For those tech enthusiasts who want to know as to how this tests were performed, below is the brief methodology as shared by PC World:
In our browser speed comparison, we pitted Internet Explorer 8 against Firefox 3.5, Chrome 2, Safari 4, and the public beta of Opera 10. We used pages from a set of eight popular Web sites in our testing: PC World (of course), Amazon, Twitter, Yahoo, YouTube, The New York Times, eBay, and Wikipedia’s English-language home page. To ensure that we measured the page-loading times as accurately as possible, we recorded our testing on video for review later on.
We performed all of our testing on a Gateway P-7808U notebook running a clean installation of Windows Vista Service Pack 1; we reinstalled the operating system before testing each browser. For each browser, we cleared the browser’s cache and then loaded each page in our test suite. We repeated the process ten times per site per browser to ensure accurate results, to factor out fluctuations in network traffic, and to build a sufficiently large sample size to identify trends. In addition, we threw out the two best and the two worst scores for each page load test to further reduce the influence of fluctuations and to produce more consistent results.
Some browsers will report that a page has finished loading even though parts of the page haven’t yet appeared. We didn’t base our determination of when a page was loaded on the browser’s opinion. Instead, we relied on whether all visual elements of the page were loaded and ready to use. For example, on Yahoo’s home page, we judged the page to be ready when all of its graphics and images were loaded.
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