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Update: Digg it
Update: Just for fun, while I do this, one of the first 25 people to register and comment on this post (http://www.dealminded.com/viewtopic.php?id=45) will receive a free All-Ett -- $24 value! (Jeff--me--doesn't count)
Safari 3.0 is supposed to be much faster than its competition. Let's find out how tree that is.
Tests were conducted using a customized version of Sean Kane's JS benchmark. Each test was run 100 times on either a Mac G4 (1.5 Ghz) or Intel Pentium 4 (2.5 GHz). The tests were run with balanced browser restarts and computer restarts in order to cancel out any confounds, thus acquiring independent samples.
Overall Speed:
Safari 3.0 (Win): 398.6 ms
Safari 3.0 (Mac): 412.4 ms
OmniWeb 5.5.4 (Mac): 814 ms
Opera (Mac): 829 ms
Camino 1.5 (Mac): 1415.6 ms
Firefox 2.0 (Mac): 1755.8 ms
Firefox 2.0 (Win): 1768.6 ms
IE 7 (Win): 2101 ms
IE 6 (Win): 2109.2 ms
Safari 2.0 (Mac): 2727 ms
Broken Down
As you can see, it looks like Apple wasn't kidding us about the gains in Javascript speed with the release of Safari 3.0 for both Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista. Especially, impressive is the work they've done on speeding things up compared to 2.0. Notice how Safari 3.0's total is less than some of the individual times!
While I was running these tests on another machine connected to the internet (not being used for testing), Safari 3.0 was noticeably snappier when visiting JS-intensive pages--I guess it wasn't my fan-boy bias after all. Good job, Steve.
Just a couple notes on some new features for us Mac users:
Command-Q asks before closing all of the windows open.
Because Command-W was only a key away from Command-Q, many times an accidental key press closed all open windows instead of the one intended. In terms of interface design, this was not good. The addition of the check makes me happy though.
History->Reopen Last Closed Window
History->Reopen All Windows From Last Session
Who wouldn't like these features!
One thing I'm wondering about is applescript hooks; I'll have to play with those later.
19 Responses to “Safari Browser Speed Test and Comparison (Mac + Win)”
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Guess I expected more benchmarks to be shown. Very nice though.
Yeah, me too, although the beta was JUST released!
The first round of javascript tests took a while. Did balanced browswer restarts, computer restarts, etc. I'm working vanilla HTML tests, but those will take a bit longer, as I have to add some network clean-up in there.
Was wondering if you will be doing benchmarks on an Intel based Mac? I'd be interested in seeing if there is any difference between them. The Windows pentium 4 and G4 show little difference which was not expected.
Won't be able to get to my intel-mac today. My guess is that using any processor greater than the two I tested (relatively comparable) will have little difference given the computational costs of running javascript in a browser. Even if there is a differences, I'd bet it wouldn't show up in a statistical test given the amount of variance in some of the browser times.
I encourage anyone w/ an intel mac to send me the data though, and I'll get it posted ASAP.
Very nice although expected more benchmark
Good comparison. I'm a little surprised how well it performs on the Windows version versus the Mac. And also interesting to see how poorly Safari 2 fared especially considering Apple's claims.
I was surprised about this. I felt Safari 2 struggling a bit on some sites, but I always chalked it up to memory leaks.
Well I am using it on my PC at work, and it looks terribly fuzzy. Speed increase was not noticeble since we only have 1/2 a T1.
Ill take that wallet thing.
I'm using it on a 2.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with 2GB of RAM. I ran the test 25 times with an average speed 190.434 ms. Hope this helps.
I'll take a wallet also :-P
Sorry I meant to mention that I did the same using Firefox and got a score of 783.667 ms.
Great, thanks! I'm surprised the processor matters that much. Maybe I need to upgrade this laptop....
I'm really surprised how much faster Safari is compared to Firefox 2. I usually don't like Apple products but this might turn me around (probably why Apple released a Windows version in the first place
). I'd be interested in how the final versions of Firefox 3 and Safari 3 compare.
Jeff Yoshimura
P.S. Those wallets look nice
Wow, Firefox is much slower than I realized! I'm going to have to download Safari and check it out!
(Yeah, yeah, the wallets look pretty awesome!)
Safari ftw.
Thanks for sharing these benchmarks so quickly. I'm looking forward to trying Safari on my XP machine. I'm not sure if I can live without some of my firefox extensions, but the speed advantages of Safari might make up for them.
wow! great....thanks
That's all fine and good, but the main reason I use Firefox, even on OS X is the extensions and extensibility. Fast JavaScript processing is great, but I've gotten addicted to AdBlock and Greasemonkey (to name a very, very few). Yes, all the extensions slow down Firefox and add some bloat to it (not to mention the theoretical security risks), but they really enhance my browsing experience. Considering how many hours I spend in the browser, that's a good thing.
Who wouldn't take that wallet?
It free xD
anyways, Im testing this on a ASUS laptop with a pentium D 740
Nvidia GO 6200 graphics card with 1 GB of DDR2 RAM
7.97 MB setup package, not bad, but it was compressed with 7zip
Very fast startup time, the first page took a while to load though, probably all the scripts on the apple page.
The browser acts too much like a Mac's
In settings, i was looking for the ok, or apply button, couldn't find one. >.<
otherwise, i going to this browser, but ill miss my greasemonkey extensions
I might check it out then. I've become rather well-adjusted to Camino and it would take something for me to go back to Safari. Faster speeds might do that, if it were noticeable.
edit: Nevermind. I only have OS X 10.3.9. Safari 3 requires 10.4.9. Camino it is!