Web Browser Grand Prix 5: Opera 11.50, Firefox 5, And Chrome 12

Web Browser Grand Prix Setup

Test System Specs

Starting with this article, we're adding a battery life benchmark to the WBGP. Obviously, the desktop test system doesn't work for this type of metric, so we pulled out the old first-gen Dell Inspiron Mini 10v for this new test.

Both our page load time tests and the new Facebook JSGameBench are server/client benchmarks and require a local Web server. For this, we polished up one of our finest old beige boxen, installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server, and connected it to our LAN.

Setup

Before testing, Windows 7 was fully updated to Service Pack 1 on 6/20/11 for the 64-bit desktop test system, and on 6/25/2011 for the 32-bit netbook test system. On both test systems, power management was set to never engage and all Action Center notifications were disabled. The table below lists all the additional software installed onto the test systems, including drivers, plug-ins, and the Web browsers:

Methodology

The computer was restarted and allowed to warm-up before benchmarking the next browser. Other than the conformance benchmarks, all of our final scores are an average of several iterations. More iterations were run on tests that have short durations, lower scales, and/or higher variations. The table below lists all of the 37 benchmarks in the current WBGP test suite, along with the number of iterations performed for each test.

Additional details about a specific benchmark can be found on the corresponding benchmark results page.