Browser benchmarks: IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari
Published: 23 May 2008
Windows Vista SP1: HTML, XML, JavaScript (iBench 5.0)
The seven browsers we tested load HTML and XML/CSS pages under Windows Vista at a variety of speeds. According to iBench 5.0, Safari 3.1 is the fastest browser and Opera 9.27 the slowest; the latter takes over twice as long as any other browser to load HTML pages. However, the beta version of Opera 9.5 performs significantly better, and is on a par with the middle-ranking browsers.
In the iBench 5.0 JavaScript tests, Safari 3.1 is again the fastest browser, while Microsoft's browsers bring up the rear in JavaScript/HTML DOM tests. The JavaScript tests also expose greater performance differences among the browsers than the HTML/XML tests: in the JavaScript tests, the slowest browser is about 10 times slower than the fastest.
The various beta versions show significant performance improvements in some tests. For example, Firefox 2.0.13 completed the JavaScript/HTML DOM test in 3.1 seconds, while the Firefox 3 Beta 5 took only 0.65 seconds. The two Opera browsers show a similar pattern: Opera 9.27 was slowest in the JavaScript test (2.54s), while Opera 9.5 Beta 4758 delivered the second best result (0.36s).
It should be noted that iBench 5.0's reported values for the Safari browser are underestimates of the actual timings, which we checked manually. The reason is the measuring methodology in iBench 5.0, which uses the 'onload' event to signal that a page has been loaded: most browsers load the page, decode images and run stylesheets and scripts before firing 'onload'. Safari does not do this. There's no doubt that Apple's browser is fast, but it's not as far ahead of its competitors as iBench 5.0 suggests — as our next test shows.
Timings in seconds: shorter bars are better.
Timings in seconds: shorter bars are better.
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