The charts below are adapted from Browser Speed
Comparisons and reduced to fit this page. "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. Click any chart to see a full-sized version (size
about 40K per chart).
The fastest-launching browser is Camino 0.8 for Mac OS X, and
three of the four fastest launching browsers are OS X-only. iCab
2.9.8 for Mac OS 9 also makes the top ten. The Mac does very
well in this test.
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.
When it comes to displaying a page that uses Cascading Style
Sheets, top honors go to Safari 2.0 for Mac OS X 10.4 (based
on the current prerelease version). The next-fastest OS X
browser in this test is Safari 1.2, which takes 12th place. As
Safari 2.0 demonstrates, there's lots of potential to improve speed
on the other Mac browsers.
A lot of pages on the Web are created as tables - that's the old
fashioned way and the way we still do things at Low End Mac. Opera
6.03 for Linux is fastest here, followed by the Windows version.
Opera 8.0 is the fastest OS X browser and holds 7th place, and
Safari 1.2 rates 10th. OS X browsers generally lag well behind
Windows browsers, so there's real room for improvement here.
Scripting is very common on the Web, and when it comes to
running scripts, Opera is king - the top five browsers in this test
are versions of Opera on Linux, Windows, and OS X. Opera 8.0
for OS X takes 5th place, and Safari 2.0 for OS X 10.4
takes 10th. This is one area where Mac browsers really need to
improve.
Displaying images is where Mac OS X excels. The four browsers
that scored fastest on the multiple images benchmark were all
OS X ones, and seven of the fastest 10 browsers run on
OS X. This is where AltiVec really pays off, because the G4
tested runs at only half the clock speed of the Pentium 4 in the
Windows and Linux machines.
Hitting the Back button in your browsers may display the last
page nearly instantaneously - or it may take several seconds to
redisplay it. Opera 8.0 for Windows wins this test, with Opera 8.0
for Mac taking third place and the Linux version holding the fourth
spot. Three of the ten fastest browsers in this test run under
OS X - so do four of the slowest five.
