Reliability, Responsiveness, And Security
Reliability
Our reliability test is conducted after loading 40 tabs. We open them all simultaneously and record how many pages require a reload due to broken formatting or missing elements. The best score a browser can achieve here is zero, and the worst is 40.
Once again, Opera exhibits solid reliability, only requiring one reload. The second-place finisher is Safari with five failures, followed closely by IE9 with six and Firefox with seven. Chrome suffers nine failures, putting it in last place.
Responsiveness
In the last Web Browser Grand Prix, our dusty old test system made it very easy for us to compare responsiveness. Although none of the browsers slowed to a crawl using our much more modern hardware platform, IE9 does regularly crash and restart itself. And because we have to wait for 40 tabs to finish loading before checking for failures in the reliability test, we noticed we don't wait very long when testing Opera. Firefox treats us to a short wait, too.
We're confident in calling Opera 12 the responsiveness winner. Firefox presents a strong case, while Chrome and Safari are both merely average. IE9 is dubbed weak in this discipline.
Security
BrowserScope Security is the first legitimate security test we've come across that the browsers haven't already beaten. It consists of 17 pass/fail tests, making 17 the maximum score.
Chrome 20 grabs first place with the high score of 16 tests passed, and is followed by fellow WebKit-based Apple Safari. Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 passes 13 tests to earn a third-place finish, beating arch-rival Mozilla Firefox. Opera 12 lands at the bottom, passing just ten out of the 17 tests.