Browser Comparisons: Warm Start Speed

Dan Knight , 2005.02.14

The charts below are adapted from Browser Speed Comparisons. "Supplementary" browsers are not shown, and colors are used to differentiate operating systems. Color code:

• Mac OS X: red
• Mac OS 9: green
• Linux: yellow
• Windows XP: blue

On each of these graphs, the shorter bar represents faster performance.

Windows can leave programs partially memory-resident after you quit them, letting them relaunch faster than a cold start. That said, the fastest browser relaunch comes from Konqueror 3.2 (KDE) on Linux - and iCab 2.9.8 takes second place. Internet Explorer 5.1 under OS 9 also makes the top ten, but none of the OS X browsers do.

That said, once you launch a browser in OS X, there's really no reason to quit and relaunch it - you can just leave in inactive in the background.

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