Web Browser Grand Prix: Chrome 18, Firefox 11, Windows XP

Features
By Adam Overa
published

Over the past two years, we've tested the top five Web browsers using modern PC hardware. But today, going against all that is sacred to the enthusiast crowd, we're breaking out an old beige box to bring you Web Browser Grand Prix: Windows XP Edition!

DOM And CSS Performance Benchmarks

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DOM

Mozilla Dromaeo DOM

Opera once again takes the lead in the DOM portion of Mozilla's Dromaeo test suite with a score of nearly 1700. The browser's margin of victory on our decade-old desktop is amazing, more than tripling the second-place finisher's score. Firefox takes a distant second place at around 525 runs per second, followed by Chrome at 420 and Safari at 383. IE8 cannot run the current version of Dromaeo.

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CSS

Microsoft Maze Solver

Chrome takes the lead in Microsoft's Maze Solver CSS benchmark, completing the first five mazes in an average of under ten seconds. Safari places second with a time just under 20 seconds. Opera takes third place, followed by Firefox. Meanwhile, IE8 takes an unfortunate 20 minutes, putting it in last place.

Adam Overa
61 Comments Comment from the forums
  • wheredahoodat
    "Both Opera and Chrome feltmuch smoother on our old PC than Firefox"

    I do kinda feel the difference with Firefox's responsive going from my main modern desktop to my older labtop that has regulated to a makeshift HTC. I believe Firefox XUL interface is the culprit; it was a big enough problem for Firefox mobile to abandon it in favor of native Android GUI, but who knows at this point. I guess might actually give Opera a chance.
    Reply
  • agnickolov
    How come only a single reader requested numerical composite scoring, that's the most logical way of scoring after all! With that said, I'd have liked if you didn't use the rankings but the raw scores after a more intelligent transformation as the input for weighted averaging...
    For example, for each category you could subtract the lowest-placed score from all scores and then normalize in the range by dividing all adjusted scores by the topmost adjusted score. This way the top perfomer always has 1 and the worst performer always has 0 modified score (you'd need to invert them for tests where lower is better of course, e.g. subtract these from 1). Then apply your ranks to these scores and you get the composite score. It's not a perfect transformation, but it certainly has more fairly distributed weight (pun intended) than what you have used here.
    Reply
  • gwiz1987
    Why is IE8 being benched and not IE9?
    Reply
  • aznjoka
    Thats my Opera, for those who have never tried Opera. It's an amazing piece of software, it does the job, and it does it better then most.
    Reply
  • confish21
    Interesting move to make this article. Well done! Don't waste your time on a vista run though... Im so close my release date. xD
    Reply
  • csbeer
    aznjokaThats my Opera, for those who have never tried Opera. It's an amazing piece of software, it does the job, and it does it better then most.
    XP can't run 9. Need to upgrade OS in order to get higher IE.
    Reply
  • dameon51
    gwiz1987Why is IE8 being benched and not IE9?XP doesn't support 9, only 8.
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    excellent review!
    some points:

    1.A lot of corporates still use IE7. maybe you should include that too in your benchmarks

    2.if you remove HTML5 (with and without H/W acceleration), i think Opera's victory margin will be quite huge.

    3.Regarding smoothness, i beleive FF is quite poor in this. But the developers know about it and are very activle working on it. I thik FF13 will be the release when smoothness will improve. look at "Firefox Snappy".

    4. i would like to have a subjective recommendation at the end of the article, something you subjectively felt was the best amongst all the browsers, even though it may be trailing in numbers.
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    Why did you use the AGP? I bet 99.99% of those Pentium4 era computers use the onboard Intel IGP.
    Also that would definitely disable the H/W acceleration of browsers.

    Reply
  • Anyone who is still stuck using Windows 2000, Opera supports you.

    Reply