Everyone always wants the best browser out there, and I’m not here to just say yeah yeah Firefox is the best blah blah blah, I’ve used firefox for many years and I say it is an excellent browser, but lately I’ve grown a liking to Apple’s Safari 4 which I have to say is neat but lacks features, but I don’t really care as long as I have two things that work on it:

• Download Manager Support
  I done this by settings my download manager to capture links from my clipboard so I just copy a link that I want and it sends it straight to my Download Manager
• Greasemonkey
  Unfortunately I did not get this to work, but I can live without it.

This test is basically going to show you the latest top rated internet browsers’ speed using Futuremark’s Peacekeeper, Peacekeeper basically renders different images and patterns etc. to your browser, and depending on how fast your browser can render them will determine how good the browser is.

Test Setup

OK not everyone has the same hardware and hardware does matter on benchmarks, so I will be posting my current hardware config so you can determine the speed where it comes from, mainly from the CPU though since rendering normally uses CPU power.

CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 940 @ 3.726Ghz
RAM: Corsair Dominator 4GB Memory @ 1104Mhz
GPU: ATI Radeon 4890

Nothing else will really matter so I’m not going to list it, but obviously my CPU & RAM have been overclocked so there is a performance boost there.

Results

OK this test was done in one single browser window, with no tabs and the mouse nor keyboard were in action at the time of the test, this keeps it consistent.

The Browsers tested were:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.5
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 (Latest Nightly)
• Safari 4.0.2
• Google Chrome 3
• Opera 9.6
• Opera 10 Beta 3

I have made sure that latest Beta’s were included as some people are using them and want to know differences on that too.

OK well enough chat now and onto the results.

There are also more in depth things to discuss inside each browser benchmark, such as rendering, social networking and javascript dom operations.

Top 4 Browsers In depth

Safari 4

As you can see the rendering on Safari is not up to scratch compared to it’s data production, so it may not produce images and flashy content so quickly. Social Networking to my belief may be how useful the browser for facebook, twitter etc. Complex graphic production is above half seemingly the browser can handle production of images that may stress the browser.

Google Chrome 3

Rendering on Chrome seems to be that tad bit better but Data production and DOM operations seem to be more on the down slope for Chrome, maybe this is what is lacking. As you may have known Google have been talking about how they have improved their javascript engine. Maybe it looks as though Apple are doing better on their browser.

Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1

Firefox, compared to Safari and Chrome seems to be better in Social Networking but that’s about it, it actually has lower scores than the other to upstairs. Maybe Mozilla need to do some more steps in their browser functionality.

Opera 10

Opera do have a great interface, I really like how they have designed everything, but it looks as though the benchmark information show that Opera’s DOM operations are it’s best feature and using it for a short time did show that javascript was processed very quickly.

Conclusion

As you can see Safari reigned supreme as the fastest browser getting a score of 5193, Google Chrome, not falling short of the top is second which shows only a mere 692 point difference.
Mozilla’s Firefox 3.6 Alpha seems to be on the right track in speed given that Firefox 3.5 was made to be a faster browser, so Firefox 3.6a1 made it to 3rd place. We don’t need to talk about firefox 3.5 as you can see it is 2nd to last and a quarter gap from the alpha version.
Opera, what can we say about Opera. Well quite a few people use it and believe it to be a very fast browser, well I’m not one to say it isn’t, it certainly is. According to benchmarks Opera’s current Beta is a very nice speed step up from it’s 9th version. So well done to them on increasing the rendering engine.

Of course what are benchmarks right?

Looking at these will determine javascript rendering which in today’s web, is something needed indeed.

Who’s the winner?

There is no winner, it’s just who’s on top, and I believe Apple have done it, since I use the browser for 24/7 use I do have to say it is an excellent browser and extremely speedy. Firefox is known to have the most feature’s due to it’s extensions list which are a lot.

I’m not going to give you a “Which browser is the best” answer you can determine that for yourself.