So we’ve decided to add Safari/Webkit support to our editor at work.  I don’t think any of you have seen our product, but it’s heavy on javascript (jQuery) usage.  So I decided to do a speed test with our editor to see how well each browser performs on just loading the editor.

So obviously this will test the html rendering of the browser.  It’s a big page and we use lots of CSS.  And then it will test javascript speed.  It’s pretty apparent that this isn’t the be all and end all of speed test reviews, but the results are entertaining nonetheless, especially since I can see the real world speed test of our system.  So here are the results from just loading the editor, which is the only test I’ll have time to do for now.

Test System:
Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
2 Gig Ram
Windows Vista 32-bit Business

Load Times in Seconds

• Firefox 3.0.1
  • 13.3
  • 13.3
  • 13.1
• Google Chrome
  • 7.7
  • 7.7
  • 7.1
• IE8 Beta 2
  • 11.8
  • 11.2
  • 10.8
• Safari 3.1.2
  • 10.0
  • 8.1
  • 11.5
  • 9.4
  • 8.6
• Firefox 3.1 Alpha2
  • 9.2
  • 10.0
  • 9.3

It’s pretty clear from my tests on our system that Google Chrome is clearly the fastest browser.  I remember switch from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 and seeing how much faster that was.  I wonder how slow Firefox 2 would be on our system.  Even with Firefox 3.1 new javascript engine, it’s still significantly slower than Chrome.  I know it’s just an alpha product, so it still has the potential to be faster when the final version comes out.  But 3.1 is still close to 2 seconds slower loading the page.

What was interesting to me was to see how Safari was all over the map in loading the page.  It had 8 seconds loads.  And then it had close to 12 seconds loads. I tested it some more (not shown), and those results showed the Safari was consistently inconsistent for some reason.

Chrome is not without it’s faults.  It doesn’t render the background image to one of the divs correctly in my editor (but Safari correctly renders it for some reason).  This could be because it’s using an older version of WebKit.  Incorrect.  But fast.