In the Latest Browser Performance Face-Off, A Surprise Winner Emerges

For quite a while now, open source browsers--led by Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome--have been setting the pace of innovation. If you're at all like me, you run both of these browsers, and you may run different versions of them on various operating systems. I use Firefox and Chrome on multiple platforms. Mozilla, of course, has moved to a rapid release cycle for Firefox, which is keeping new versions very competitive with Chrome performance-wise. That's what made Tom's Hardware "Web Browser Grand Prix VI" interesting when we last looked in on it. In that performance face-off, Chrome emerged as the top performer in many key tests. Now there is an update to the benchmark tests. Guess which browser performs best.

Tom's latest update to its browser benchmark tests includes all the top browsers and provides lots of granular glimpses of various types of performance. Mac users may be pleasantly surprised to learn that Safari did best in a test of which browser starts up fastest.  However, in a similar test of which browser was fastest at opening eight tabs at once, Chrome won, closely followed by Opera.

Chrome 14 was also significantly faster than Firefox 7 and all other browsers at page load tests, and also did very well in JavaScript tests and other tests that measure performance of web applications. 

Despite these tests where Chrome takes top performance honors, though, Firefox 7 actually emerges as as the winner in Tom's tests, thanks to strong performances in Java tests and others. You can find the summation of the Tom's tests here--definitely worth a look, especially if you're not yet using Firefox 7.