Browser speed test

I had been using Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7 for sometime now. Recently I decided to try other browsers just to see the difference and possibly choose the fastest and most convenient for my needs. I tried Mozilla, which I noticed was faster than both IE and Netscape.

Recently in another thread our member Kodo suggested that I should try out Opera, which I did, and surprisingly it was the fastest browser I have tested so far. I would like to share the results and details as follows:

Being an audiophile I regularly visit Andrew’s Hifi pages, which is one of the most detailed web pages that I have come across when it comes to audio and due to immense detail on the page it always takes time to load. I decided to use this very page for my test.

The results are as follows:

Internet Explorer 6 (with SP1) = 1m 35s
Netscape 7.02 = 1m 20s
Mozilla 1.3.1 = 1m 00s
Opera (7.11) = 0m 40s

Obviously my connection is not very fast but I would be very interested to know if others also get similar results. If you have a connection ten times faster, than you should get the times 1/10th of what I got and so on and so forth.

Here is the link to the Audio Website

Kudos to Kodo!

 

I didn't do an actual speed test, but I will agree with your findings based on my experience alone.

However, I've had an increasing number of problems with Opera. Every version they release seems to get worse, so last week I finally booted the dang thing off my system after it crashed -- literally -- 20+ times in a row. Google revealse it is a known issue. I'm not going to use software that doesn't get fixed (it has been an issue in Opera 7.0, 7.01, 7.02, and now 7.10). Both IE and Mozilla load the site(s) fine. As near I can tell, it is an issue with tabbed browsing. Which is half the reason I went to Opera.

I'm using Mozilla 1.4b right now, since I found a tasty plug-in for mouse gestures (the other nice feature of Opera). I find it minty fresh, and it has fewer display problems than Opera did (Yahoo Mail never worked right under Opera, either).

 

Mozilla is going to be replaced by "Firebird" maybe try that out:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/release-notes.html

 

Mozilla isn't going to be replaced by Firebird. Firebird is a variant on Mozilla that has XUL interface. Firebird, like Netscape, is just a flavor of Mozilla.

Firebird is also still in near-alpha state.

 

Here is a quote from the Mozilla roadmap about how Phoenix/Firebird will take over:

http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html

Just changed from Mozilla 1.3.1 to Firebird/Phoenix 0.6 and it works very nicely.

 

I recently downloaded Mozilla Firebird to try out.

I'm a new user of it. I'm on my second day. And so far I am very impressed with it. It loads web pages super-fast. Far better than Internet Explorer. What would take Internet Explorer several minutes to load, Mozilla Firebird loads it in seconds.

This past Thursday really did it for me. I wasn't able to get on the internet all day Thursday, because my cable modem died on me. I was able to get on Friday, but everything was SLOW as hell. Using the Internet Explorer shell called, MyIE2, web pages would take 5, 10 or more minutes to load. (IF they loaded at all, that is). I got so fed up with it, that I figured I would give Mozilla Firebird a shot. And I am very pleased with how super-fast Mozilla Firebird loads web pages. In a matter of seconds.

 

I've been trying out Opera 7.11 for a couple days now. I am VERY impressed with the speed. It took a while to get things set the way I want them, and the page loading seems a little more choppy then IE, and I had to really hunt down a spell checker that would work with it,D) But I think I am sold on it.

 

No doubt, the Phoenix/Firebird browser is the fastest.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/releases.html

 

I'm using Firebird in Windows XP and Slackware/ Linux and it's very nice to use the same browser in both OSs and they behave exactly the same.

 

I'm an avid Opera user. If it's kept updated and some of the ettings are tame then I don't have any issues with stability of it on XP pro. As kodo can point out in greater detail some webpages do not work with it, but overall 7 has the greatest compatibility of any version of opera yet.

dperino: when you need plugins for opera then you can usually install the netscape plugins and then add them via opera's control panel. It's a bit cumbersome, but they work.

 

oh and you might want to try opening the number of connections you can make to a server up in the network settings of the preferences. Depending on your connection you can see major performance gains. I have a 1.5 Mb connnection and max connections to a server is set at 8, max connections in total is set to 64. It helps when downloading multiple files from the same server especially.