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How Good Is Your Browser?

There are a few good tests you can run to test the speed of your browser is and how well it conforms to Web 2.0 standards.  I ran three tests on six popular browsers:  Camino, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.  Descriptions and test results are below.

The Acid3 test “is the third in a series of test pages written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.”

Here are the Acid3 test scores (100/100 is best):

  • Camino 1.6.7: 53/100
  • Google Chrome 3.0: 100/100
  • Internet Explorer 8: 20/100
  • Mozilla Firefox 3.5: 93/100
  • Opera 10: 100/100
  • Safari 4: 100/100

The SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark “tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other.”

Here are the Sunspider test scores (smaller is better, scores are in milliseconds):

  • Camino 1.6.9: 14086.4
  • Google Chrome 3.0: 640.8
  • Internet Explorer 8: 7076.0
  • Mozilla Firefox 3.5: 1586.8
  • Opera 10: 6621.4
  • Safari 4: 1312.4

The V8 Benchmark Suite version 4 is a “suite of pure JavaScript benchmarks.”

Here are the scores from that test (bigger is better):

  • Camino 1.6.9: 86.9
  • Google Chrome 3.0: 2773
  • Internet Explorer 8: 46.4
  • Mozilla Firefox 3.5: 238
  • Opera 10: 120
  • Safari 4: 1573

In conclusion, only three browsers passed the Acid3 web standards test: Safari 4, Opera, and Google Chrome 3.  Of those three, Google Chrome 3 is about twice as fast as Safari 4, and about ten times faster than Opera 10.  Coming in last is Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, which had the worst Acid3 test score of any browser, and was by far the slowest browser of all.  As both a Mac and Windows user, I prefer Safari 4 as it works the same way in both Windows and OSX.  (I also run Linux and OpenSolaris, but neither Chrome nor Safari are available for those operating systems.)  However, if all you run is Windows, then you should consider switching to Google Chrome 3.0 if you haven’t done so already.