Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer Performance Benchmark

Ok people (to whoever reads this) it has been a long night, I’m very tired but managed to do some testing and I came up with some interesting results. I wanted to see for myself what this Chrome madness all about is.

In my previous post I tried to “feel” all the 3 browsers and then compare my impressions with some of the early benchmarks done by the dudes at lifehacker.com. I was right about some parts of the performance tests, but wrong about others – for instance I thought that Internet Explorer has a fastest script engine. Anyways I’ll try to keep this as short as possible.

I did the testing on average desktop machine with Windows XP Professional sp3: Asus M2N-X+, AMD Athlon 64×2 dual 4800+, 1Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce 8500 GT. Used CSS speed tests, javascript speed test and timer application for the speed performance, and Task Manager for the memory test. The browsers tested Mozzila Firefox 3.1b – Minefield, Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 and Google Chrome 0.2. All the settings on default. I averaged out of 5 results. Tried to be as objective as possible.

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The cold start was a surprise, Internet Explorer 8 was the fastest to load. Another thing I noticed that IE 8 is a multiprocess browser too, ( I didn’t know that) same as Chrome. It prevents crashes to whole application. Warm Starts are pretty fast. Chrome wins here. Chrome also show its superiority in the CSS test. Draws way faster than both of its opponents. Javascript test show that Firefox handles scripts fastest. What surprised me is that Internet Explorer handled the script test unusually slow. I suspect the ActiveX controls but as I said previously the browsers were set to default.

memory overview
memory overview

Here I saw multiprocessing in action. Two of the tabs crashed in Internet Explorer with youtube videos loading, but the whole application stayed intact, which is nice, neat and handy at the same time. In this category Firefox is the winner with its modest memory requirements.

. These new generation browsers, significantly faster, improved, unlike few versions ago, improving our experience are just gonna get better. Still only betas, we’re looking forward to final versions. I personally use all of them. Firefox for developing, IE for testing, Chrome for surfing. What browser do you stick with?

8 thoughts on “Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer Performance Benchmark”

  1. Good experiment. This kind of experiments tells people what to use and what not to use. Previously I used Internet Explorer but as you mentioned Internet explorer can only be used for testing as you mentioned. I experienced the crashes. Then I switched to Firefox when Firefox 2 was released. Everything was working better with Firefox. Recently I installed the Firefox new release which caused me so many problem like instant crashing and some more error. I was really irritated a lot because of these problems caused by Firefox.i used to experience web-page crashes for every 5 to 10 minutes. So I switched to new version Internet explorer back and started using it. Day before yesterday I heard that Google released a new browser called Chrome. Since it has brand name and since the browser trustworthy company, I decided to test it. I was satisfied with it. I am a browsing addict. I like a fact about Chrome that it is a multi-threaded browser. I started using it and I will still to Google’s Chrome browser.

  2. I’ve been using Firefox for long. It’s just recently that my Firefox V3 keeps crashing. I’ve no idea why it happens, but it didn’t happen on the previous versions.

    Anyway, I’ve yet to try using Chrome. Seeing the situation I’m in, maybe I should. The browser looks pretty neat.

    What I saw in the reviews is that you can surf ‘anonymously’? I’m not sure if other browsers offer it, but man, that is cool!

  3. I have been using internet explorer since I started using computers. I have never had any problems with IE and it is the best browser in my opinion.

    I have tried Firefox and Google Chrome but they are not my type. They are quite fast but i think IE is the best of all browsers.

    Anyway, thanks for the performance test.

  4. Wow, never thought that internet explorer could have the fastest load. I myself am still using FF2 instead of FF3 or Chroma because I currently don’t want to deal with any bugs that are found in the betas, especially bugs that could open my computer to hackers/exploiters etc. I will download chroma once it is out of beta, i’m sure it is great if it is from google. :D
    Nice blog, keep posting these great articles btw :)

  5. chrome strikes me mainly because of its fabulous speed. Its far ahead when compared to FF and IE.
    The only problem here i face is that it sometimes crashes abruptly. i wish google is working on this and will release a problem free chrome soon.

  6. Yea I stopped using it too, cant get off FF. I’ve noticed that Chrome has problems with the some touchpads on some notebooks. I noticed that the first day of its release. Now there a fix on thisone but it scrolls backwards instead. When you scroll up it scrolls down and vice versa :S it is kinda funny.

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