In the last couple of days, both Google's Chrome browser and Mozilla's Firefox have come out with new betas claiming improved performance. Why not compare these new betas head-to-head?
To be fair, speed isn't everything; each of the new browser versions add new capabilities in addition to performance. The new Chrome beta offers bookmark syncing, similar to what Opera has had for over a year with its Opera Link service. Meanwhile, the Firefox 3.6 beta, which was released last Friday night, incorporates Mozilla's Personas feature, which lets users customize the look of the browser with the click of a button. It also warns users about out-of-date plugins, and adds a number developer-focused capabilities, like more support for open web video, CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies, and the Web Open Font Format.
I decided to pit the latest Firefox 3.6 beta against the latest Chrome 4.0 beta, testing startup and SunSpider JavaScript performance times. I tested on a non-state-of-the-art Athlon dual-core running at 2GHz with 2GB RAM. I also turned off all unnecessary processes in Windows Task Manager, and ran the tests thrice and took the averages.
Here are my results:
*img255.imageshack.us/img255/4599/browserchart.jpg
The result: No contest. The Chrome beta's performance on the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark was nearly twice as fast as Firefox's, at 762 millliseconds compared with 1400 for Firefox. But the Firefox result, however, shows a greater improvement over the released version. The Chrome beta only showed a 1.6 percent improvement, while the Firefox beta showed a 20 percent improvement.
Both browsers, too, have improved their startup time, both for cold startup - when you run the browser for the first time after a reboot - and warm startup, when it's already been run in your current session. In memory use, the Firefox beta was far more thrifty than the Chrome beta, by a hundred megabytes. But both of these measurements are the kind of thing that gets optimized before release.
In short, both resoundingly beat Internet Explorer in JavaScript performance with Chrome taking an extensive lead, Firefox makes more frugal use of memory, and they both continue to add new convenience features and support for advanced web coding.
Source: *www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355201,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05079TX1K0000993
To be fair, speed isn't everything; each of the new browser versions add new capabilities in addition to performance. The new Chrome beta offers bookmark syncing, similar to what Opera has had for over a year with its Opera Link service. Meanwhile, the Firefox 3.6 beta, which was released last Friday night, incorporates Mozilla's Personas feature, which lets users customize the look of the browser with the click of a button. It also warns users about out-of-date plugins, and adds a number developer-focused capabilities, like more support for open web video, CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies, and the Web Open Font Format.
I decided to pit the latest Firefox 3.6 beta against the latest Chrome 4.0 beta, testing startup and SunSpider JavaScript performance times. I tested on a non-state-of-the-art Athlon dual-core running at 2GHz with 2GB RAM. I also turned off all unnecessary processes in Windows Task Manager, and ran the tests thrice and took the averages.
Here are my results:
The result: No contest. The Chrome beta's performance on the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark was nearly twice as fast as Firefox's, at 762 millliseconds compared with 1400 for Firefox. But the Firefox result, however, shows a greater improvement over the released version. The Chrome beta only showed a 1.6 percent improvement, while the Firefox beta showed a 20 percent improvement.
Both browsers, too, have improved their startup time, both for cold startup - when you run the browser for the first time after a reboot - and warm startup, when it's already been run in your current session. In memory use, the Firefox beta was far more thrifty than the Chrome beta, by a hundred megabytes. But both of these measurements are the kind of thing that gets optimized before release.
In short, both resoundingly beat Internet Explorer in JavaScript performance with Chrome taking an extensive lead, Firefox makes more frugal use of memory, and they both continue to add new convenience features and support for advanced web coding.
Source: *www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355201,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05079TX1K0000993
