Safari beats FF on a Mac (speed, UI, multi-touch, nicer rendering) while Opera simply destroys it on Linux. But on Windows FF is really sweet: it doesn't feel so terribly slow as it does on Linux and its less-than-perfect look matches Windows perfectly
P.S. In case anybody knows how to make FF scroll faster on a machine with 800Mz CPU with Compiz, please share! I need "800Mz scrolling" for laptops in power-saving mode under conservative scaling governor. It may be GTK+ issue, though. Qt-based Opera scrolls fine, pretty much instantly, mostly using GPU, just like it should.
I don't have scrolling issues at all, and I'm currently running Gentoo Linux on a laptop that is throttled at 800 MHz. I'm not sure what exactly I can tell you, though...
- Safari is really fast at rendering CSS and slow to start up.
- Firefox 3 uses the least memory (though this isn't based on a "soak" test.
- Opera 9.5 is generally quick but is beaten on CSS and uses a fair bit of RAM.
- IE 7 isn't really good at anything except maybe loading time. No surprise on the loading time, but it uses the most RAM for open tabs!
JavaScript performance appears to vary less than some browser developers like to emphasize, IE is less than 3x slower than the fastest browsers in the JS test. (Opera + Safari)
I can anecdotally confirm the Safari start-up times on Windows, although it's a very different story on OS X. It does have to load its own GUI toolkit, although Firefox (XUL) and Opera (some in-house thing so it runs cross-platform and on phones?) also don't use native Win32 widgets.
[+] [-] tx|18 years ago|reply
P.S. In case anybody knows how to make FF scroll faster on a machine with 800Mz CPU with Compiz, please share! I need "800Mz scrolling" for laptops in power-saving mode under conservative scaling governor. It may be GTK+ issue, though. Qt-based Opera scrolls fine, pretty much instantly, mostly using GPU, just like it should.
[+] [-] BrandonM|18 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmjordan|18 years ago|reply
- Safari is really fast at rendering CSS and slow to start up. - Firefox 3 uses the least memory (though this isn't based on a "soak" test. - Opera 9.5 is generally quick but is beaten on CSS and uses a fair bit of RAM. - IE 7 isn't really good at anything except maybe loading time. No surprise on the loading time, but it uses the most RAM for open tabs!
JavaScript performance appears to vary less than some browser developers like to emphasize, IE is less than 3x slower than the fastest browsers in the JS test. (Opera + Safari)
I can anecdotally confirm the Safari start-up times on Windows, although it's a very different story on OS X. It does have to load its own GUI toolkit, although Firefox (XUL) and Opera (some in-house thing so it runs cross-platform and on phones?) also don't use native Win32 widgets.
[+] [-] reggplant|18 years ago|reply
Although FF3 has had a great boost in its performance and load times for web pages, the WebKit nightlies kick its ass IMO.
And again, the mac theme isn't quite right with non-native menus etc.
[+] [-] snewe|18 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajbatac|18 years ago|reply
Better something than nothing.