Page Load Time
The page load time tests are the same eight pages in our start time tests: About, Amazon, Ask, craigslist, Google, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and Yahoo.
Composite Scoring
Composite scores are the geometric mean of the uncached and cached page load times.
Chrome is in first place on OS X, followed closely by Safari, at 0.65 and 0.7 seconds (respectively). Opera places third at just over three-quarters of a second, with Firefox placing last with a time just over 0.8 seconds.
The page load times are also lower across the board on Windows 7 than OS X. Here, Microsoft's own IE9 takes the lead at just 0.4 seconds. Close behind in second place is Chrome at 0.44 seconds, followed by Opera in third with a time of almost 0.47 seconds. Firefox comes in last place at nearly 0.6 seconds.
Drill Down
The charts below contain the geometric mean for uncached and cached page load times, as well as the individual page load time averages.
Opera seems to have more trouble than the rest of the OS X browsers at uncached page loads of About and Ask. However, this behavior goes away when loading from cache.
Firefox for Windows also reveals longer load times for About and Ask, but when loading from cache. In a reversal of what we observe on OS X, Opera for Windows 7 displays an advantage over the other browsers when performing an uncached page load on About and Ask.
