After incorporating every possible feature within their browser, either through built-in feature or through support for add-ons, browser makers seem to be concentrating on one thing and one thing only - Speed.
Every new version of the browser boasts of increased speed compared to its previous version. 10%, 20%, 50% faster, such figures aren't hard to come by. Whether the browser actually delivers these figures or does it really matter in real life usage is a different matter altogether. But one thing is for sure, these browser makers really want you to browse the web as fast as it is technologically possible.
Recently Google released the version 5 Beta for their popular Chrome browser. But instead of just stating that it is fast, they went ahead and did something totally outrageous. They compared the browsing speed to that of a speeding potato shot through a custom-made canon, the waves of sound and a bolt of electricity. As usual, when it comes to such things, we were a bit skeptical while watching their video. To be honest, we do not believe that any browser is as fast as a bolt of electricity, or even a flying potato for that matter! Or maybe we are just used to the terrible Internet speeds here in India.
But we had to test it ourselves. We did not have access to potato-shooting canons or Tesla coils, so instead we decided to take the traditional and more realistic route to testing the browser performance - loading some webpages on it and comparing it with others that are available. We also threw in a couple of benchmarks to get a better idea of the situation.
We ran the test on a Dell Studio 14 with 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8700, 4GB RAM and running on Windows 7 Ultimate 32-Bit. For comparison, we took all the major browsers out there, including:
- Internet Explorer 8
- Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2
- Google Chrome 4
- Google Chrome 5 Beta
- Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3
- Mozilla Firefox 3.6.4 Beta build 3
- Apple Safari 4.0.5
- Opera 10.53
Note that we were only testing the speed and performance of the browser, not its actual usability and other features. So go ahead and check the results.
Peacekeeper Score
Acid 3 Test Score
Internet Browsing Speed Test (Click on image for high resolution version with actual time in seconds)
For the test we opened the Techtree homepage, Twitter login page, Facebook login page, Amazon home page, The Big Picture homepage, Wikipedia page for this entry, Softpedia home page, InterfaceLIFT home page, Google Maps homepage, and then we downloaded this high resolution image. All these are sites we use on a regular basis and hence they are the best judge for a browser's speed.
As you can see, Chrome 5 Beta is not really all that fast in real life compared to other browsers, although it did have an edge in the Peacekeeper browser benchmarks. Also, Chrome beta isn't as fast as Google claims it to be.
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