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.

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

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?

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