* Browser Benchmark: IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari
posted by Thom Holwerda on Sat 31st May 2008 18:25 UTC, submitted by Jaikrishnan Janardhanan
IconThe first webpage was served off a NeXTcube at CERN, Switzerland, developed by Tim Berners-Lee. He also wrote the first web browser, confusingly named WorldWideWeb - the world of web browsers has come a long way since then, more or less turning into a platform of their own. This puts increasing pressure on web browsers to be really really good pieces of software, and as such, ZDnet has a 7-page comparison of the world's major web browsers, comparing Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

ZDnet used the iBench and SunSpider benchmark suites; the former tests performance of HTML, XML, and JavaScript, while the latter deals solely with JavaScript. The suites were loaded off local webservers, to Windows Vista SP1 and Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard machines. The conclusions are clear:

Overall, and taking the performance of the beta versions into consideration, the browser performance rankings are as follows: Firefox and Safari in a clear lead ahead of Opera and finally Internet Explorer. Firefox 3, due in June, promises very good performance and efficient memory usage. No browser used less memory to open multiple sites than the Beta 5 version of Firefox 3, and only a few sites failed to display correctly. Safari and Opera, however, are more likely to exhibit incompatibilities.

As with all benchmarks we link to on OSNews: do with it as you please.

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