L. sent me a link this morning to a screencap of some browser benchmarks that he’d done, then to the site where he’d done them. Of course, I was curious (he knew that would happen), so I ran tests on all of the browsers I have installed on my ageing desktop. By far the fastest was Chromium, which appears to be reporting as Chrome (like Google Chrome), but really isn’t; as I understand it, the Chromium OSS project was founded by Google, then they built Chrome on top of it, but it’s no longer OSS, though Chromium is, and someone’s taken over development. At just 0.2, Chromium is still pre-alpha and missing a number of features (you can’t even switch tabs yet), but compared to FF, Opera and Epiphany on Linux, it’s quick, so I hope they keep at it! This is FF running in Safe Mode so that all of my extensions and other customisations are disabled. With everything enabled (that includes my 21 active extensions), it shows down from 305 to 264.

Again curious, I booted to XP to see how the browsers I had stacked up. I forgot to test before updating Opera to the latest version (had 9.06 on there), and I had to install Chrome again because I’d uninstalled it before (updater annoyed me) but I did still have IE 6 (shows you how often I use IE), so I tested that, then installed IE 7, and then IE 8 (yes, I had to fucking reboot after every one of them, but it was in the name of science!) Doesn’t matter to me that 8 is still in beta because I’ll never use it anyway. Again, FF is in Safe Mode; I don’t have nearly as many extensions in the copy on XP as I do the one I use daily on Linux, but there are still quite a few. FF with extensions enabled slowed from 383 to 335. I still wouldn’t give up extensions; that’s perhaps the thing I like most about FF. Safari 4.0 beta kicks everyone arse here, even the browser touted as a “speed demon”, Google Chrome.

Even though FF doesn’t come out on top no matter what, I do think I’ll continue to use it for my day-to-day browsing. I usually use Safari for what little time I’m booted to XP, but I think it’s worth it to me to give up speed in return for the ability to customise practically everything. I got Safari to “non-annoying”, and it is fast, but in FF, I can highlight a word and translate it to or from several languages, I can highlight a word or phrase and look it up on Wikipedia/imDB/whatever, highlight a non-formatted URL and go there with just a click, and capture an entire page instead of just the visible area. Advertisements are blocked, so are scripts, Flash doesn’t play unless I tell it to play. For some sites, I have custom stylesheets that are easier on my eyes, and for others (like Flickr), I have increased functionality (hate typing out HTML tags), and I can remove individual bits (or even a single word) from web pages if they bother me, even if they aren’t advertisements. Ubiquity is a pretty cool extension, too, if I could remember more often to use it. Anyway, it was interesting to see how the various browsers stacked up, and also interesting how poorly IE performed. Not surprising, just interesting. 🙂