Web Browser Grand Prix: Firefox 15, Safari 6, OS X Mountain Lion

Round-ups
By published

Today we're breaking out the Hackintosh for our first-ever Web Browser Grand Prix on Apple OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). How will Chrome 21, Firefox 15, Opera 12.02, and Safari 6 stack up against each other, and to IE9 and the rest of the Windows 7 browsers?

Plug-In Performance: Flash, Java, Silverlight

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Composite Scoring

Safari, Opera, and Firefox are in a practical tie for first place on OS X. Chrome, with its special built-in version of Flash, performs slightly worse than the other contenders. The same results are seen on Windows 7, although the scores are nearly double the OS X scores.

Java

Java

Java is a complete four-way tie on both operating systems, with Windows 7 more than doubling the OS X scores.

Silverlight

Silverlight performance is another four-way tie on Mountain Lion, however Firefox is shown to be a cut above the competition on Windows 7.

Drill Downs

The charts below contain the detailed view of each RIABench test for Flash, Java, and Silverlight.

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Flash - OS X
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Flash - Windows 7

Chrome is usually slightly behind in Flash performance due to its sand-boxed Flash player, the only real surprise here is Firefox for Windows having a small advantage in Silverlight performance.