Firefox 3.0 vs Opera 9.5 vs Safari 3.1.1 vs IE 8.0 beta 1 comparison

Jun 18th, 2008 | By Premnath Sah | Category: Software, Technology

As Mozilla has released Firefox 3.0 to public, we @ linker thought that its time to compare the latest offerings from the stable of Mozilla, Opera, Apple and Microsoft.

This test was run on a Dell Vostro 1200 with Core2Duo T5270 @ 1.4 GHz and 1GB Ram.

Download size of browsers

Firefox 3.0	Opera 9.5	Safari 3.1.1	IE 8.0 beta 1
7.1 MB	8.5 MB	18.6 MB	11 MB

Firefox 3.0 gets a head start with smallest download size.

Note: All downloads where US English if available.

Performance test is being done using SunSpider

Performance

	Firefox 3.0	Opera 9.5	Safari 3.1.1	IE 8.0 beta 1
3D	565	699.6	713.4	1471.8
Access	791.4	1016.4	938	2256.8
Bitops	559.6	800.8	748	1736.6
Controlflow	68.8	89.2	154.8	382
Crypto	322.8	401.6	434.2	997.6
Date	425.6	1029.8	535.8	1127.2
Math	538.2	546	773.2	1292.6
Regexp	391	735.6	476	638.6
String	1219.4	1720.6	1372.4	3913.4

Its interesting to know that Firefox wins in every performance test closely followed by Safari 3.1.1. Opera 9.5 seems to lag behind Safari 3.1.1 by a small margin. Internet Explorer is the slowest among the browsers tested. IE 8.0 Beta 1 requires almost 3 times more time to complete the test. Firefox 3 is a clear leader and world fastest browser now available.

Memory Usage (one tab):

Firefox 3.0	Opera 9.5	Safari 3.1.1	IE 8.0 Beta 1
45 MB	27 MB	31.5 MB	20.5 MB

Interestingly IE uses least memory followed by Opera and Safari. Firefox is coming last in this test.

Note: Memory usage was test with just one tab which had www.lnkr.net loaded.

Memory Usage (10 tabs):

	Firefox 3.0	Opera 9.5	Safari 3.1.1	IE 8.0 Beta 1
Peak	73 MB	95.4 MB	99.7 MB	65 MB
Idle	57.4 MB	63.4 MB	51.1 MB	51.5 MB

Peak is max memory used when loading the 10 pages.
Idle is amount of memory used after the browser was left alone for few minutes.

Our test shows that Mozilla Firefox is the clear leader in desktop browser. This is clear example of what Open source applications can do. Will Opera / Safari catch up with Firefox’s speed any time soon? what do you think?

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