Windows 8 Web Browser Grand Prix Competitors
Before we get started, let's go over the test setup and changes to the benchmark suite.
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Summary
- Opera: Has The Fat Lady Sung?
- Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera
- Test Setup And Benchmark Suite
- Wait Times: Start-Up
- Wait Times: Page Load
- JavaScript And DOM Performance
- HTML5 And CSS3 Performance
- Hardware Acceleration Performance
- Memory Efficiency
- Reliability And Security
- Standards Conformance
- The WBGP XVI Winner's Circle
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While this is interesting, I still encounter built-in pages (such as on routers or other network devices) that will not render cleanly in Firefox, but are perfect in IE. More often than not though, pages that would be filled with nuisance ads and popups are cleaned up nicely by Firefox with AdBlock+ and NoScript.
I have both and start up times for IE are quick but page load times are horrendously slow, whereas FF has slow start up times but superfast page load times. It's possible that add-ons are contributing to that.
1) Pages load noticeably slower
2) Memory usage is indeed high (as seen in the benchmark above)
3) FF add-ons are much better than chrome extensions.
I never noticed any startup time difference for both FF and Chrome; it's possible they're both fast enough that it doesn't even matter at this point. I also like the FF toolbars better although that's really more of a personal preference. I've never tried maxthon though; heard it's pretty good.
I'll miss a hell of a lot of stuff when I move off Presto-based Opera.
Still, this test shows us once more, that no modern browser - I exclude Opera from this, since it isn't a maintained release anymore - must absolutely be replaced by the winner of such tests. If you don't mind performance weaknesses of the Internet Explorer in certain areas, or if your most-accessed websites don't require you to use a certain alternative, then even Microsoft's browser of choice can be okay for daily use (if only as an engine in products like Avant, Maxthon, etc).
The one thing I'm a bit curious about: why does Opera Next suddenly behave so differently from Chrome? Yes, there's a difference between Chrome 27 (WebKit) and Opera Next (Blink = Chrome 28), but if that's the only reason for the browser's weaker showing, then the future of Chrome doesn't look too good. What's your take on this?
I'm guessing it should have said i5-3570K.
Can I make a request for your next test? Try comparing SSDs and HDDs in some of the tests, especially cold boot. They are becoming more and more popular, and at least with some of these tests, I imagine they do have a significant impact on performance.
When the Chromium-based version becomes stable, it will be called Opera.
I love customizability and plug-in support of Firefox. I also love the separate address and search bars. If I type "IBM" into the address bar I want to go directly to the website, if I want to search then I'll use the search bar. Unfortunately, whenever I install Firefox, I have to re-enable the "go directly to the website" ability in the address bar because, starting with Firefox 4, some dork at Mozilla changed the functionality of the address bar.
Up/down keys are your friend.
One other pet peeve I have is that the autopredict in browsers have a habit of interpreting '192.168.1.1' as '192.168.1.104', if you visit the latter more frequently. Someone disable autopredict for IP addresses, and I will use your browser.