Well, the conclusion is quite clear: Opera beat the shit out of everything else. It’s more than 3.5 times faster than all of the other competing browsers. Your mileage may vary based on your machine and version of browser. Although the conditions of the test are not typical of the average webpage, there are webpages, like Digg, that are extremely Javascript-intensive, and the difference in Javascript speeds would be very noticeable. Perhaps a test like this will convince someone to switch to Opera for performance reasons. I cannot explain why Opera’s Javascript is so much quicker than the other two browsers — perhaps someone would like to contact me with an answer. For now, I believe I’ll still stick to my Firefox because of its extensions and interface — but this test will certainly give me reason to look further into converting to Opera.
I have tried running the test using Flock 0.7.4.1 and I average between 1300 and 1450, which is still very fast compared to Firefox 1.5 and IE6. Camino does 800-900, which is really amazing compared to Firefox. However, Safari is close to Opera on this test, averaging 520. Amazing, huh? I wonder how IE7, Safari 3, Firefox 2 and Flock 1.0 will perform.
technorati tags:flock, camino, safari, opera
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