Firefox 4.0b | Chrome 7 | Opera 10.63 | Safari 5.0.2| SeaMonkey 2.0.10 | Internet Explorer 8
One of my friend today updated his status on Facebook to say that he is thrilled with FF 4 beta. I am keen follower of browsers and updates. Firefox is one of the most appealing browser to me and hence I started my test with Firefox 4.0b7. They have a very good page created for their new updates to show "Whats New". Its called an Ant Test! What the test page does is it loads a Page that does stressful tasks for the browse. And thus while the browser is busy showing test page it shows up statistics of how is browser doing in terms of javascript (JS Speed) execution and frame refresh (fps)
I had no previous version of Firefox to compare hence, loaded Opera 10.63 (my favorite browser). And to my surprise Firefox 4.0b7 was not able to meet the performance that Opera 10.63 had shown within first few seconds of "Start" of the test. So I "Added Food" and then brought on the "Spider" in all these conditions Opera was significantly faster both in "JS Speed" and "fps"
So I thought of putting all my browsers to test.... I loaded Chorme, SeaMonkey, Safari and of course Firefox and Opera were on.
It was soon clear thatSeaMonkey 2.0.5 was pathetically SLOW and could not even coup with the JS Speed of double digits and fps of even 5-7. So I dropped SeaMonkey out of the test. (....DNF!)
As expected Internet Explorer 8 could not even load the page for the Ant test... I do not know why everything is appears broken in IE now a days... :( (... yet another DNF!)
When I started recording some trends, I realized that Chrome as built in Task Manager that shows how other browsers loaded are performance on Memory front. I kicked it ON.
Thus in a short while I noticed Safari 5.0.2 (No 2) to be a clear Champion in frame refresh but little slow on JS speed, where Opera 10.63 (No 1) stood a clear Winner in JS Speed and lowest memory footprint, followed by close race of Firefox 4.0b7 (No 3) and Chrome 7 (No 4) where Chrome finished last.
Parameters evaluated during the Ant test are
JS Speed: Javascript Engine Speed - How fast the browser is capable of executing the javascript
fps: frames per second - How efficient is the browser in refreshing the content of the web page
Memory: How much space in RAM does the browser occupy while you are surfing
The results of the tests are as below
| Browser | JS Speed | fps | Memory | Rank |
| Opera 10.63 | 220-260 | 50-70 | 55K-60K | 1 |
| Safari 5.0.2 | 200-240 | 30-70 | 110K-130K | 2 |
| Firefox 4.0b7 | 150-205 | 25-55 | 75K-90K | 3 |
| Chrome 7 | 80-180 | 20-40 | 200K-500K | 4 |
| SeaMonkey 2.0.10 | 10-20 | 5-7 | NA | DNF |
| Internet Explorer 8 | NA | NA | NA | DNF |
Screen shots to aid the results:
Top Left: SeaMonkey 2.0.10
Middle Left: Chrome 7
Bottom Left: Safari 5.0.2
Top Right: Firefox 4.0b7
Middle Right: Opera 10.63
Bottom Right: Internet Explorer 8
JS Speed Screenshot:
fps Screenshot:
