Browser Wars - The Showdown!
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Real World Application Testing and Memory Loading
Real World Application Testing and Memory Loading
On to real world testing, we've loaded each browser with a set of 20 different web pages (a total of 20 tabs) to see how fast each browser takes to finish loading and rendering all of the requested websites. Understandably, we did worry about how latency would affect this test since it does play an important part for this test, but to our luck, our connection remained stable during the multiple runs for each browser to ensure that latency isn't a big factor. Not surprisingly, Chrome turns out to be the zippiest among the lot, with Minefield and Opera very close behind. Safari doesn't fare too badly either but again, you'll find IE8 right at the back of the lot. We do like to point out though that Safari 4 may be faster, but we experienced some odd freezes when loading the 20 pages that may have been a cause of its slower performance despite doing so well on the other tests.
For another point of comparison, we'll be checking the memory load of each browser when all 20 tabs have finished loading to see which browser hogs up the most memory. From being the fastest browser, Chrome ends up as the worst browser in this comparison. This is because of the way the browser is designed with each tab treated as a separate process with its own memory allocation. Opera comes out as the lightest of the lot, followed by Minefield, IE8 and Safari. Of course, do note that as these browsers are still in alpha and beta stages, they may be lacking in features that could possibly end up using up more resources.
