What's the fastest browser? Maybe you're measuring it wrong

On an SSD, good connection etc. here, Firefox with over a dozen add-ons is not noticeably slower than vanilla Chrome. So, Firefox for me :D
 
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I've never relied on java speed tests and launch times to gauge my browsers. I've always been firm in using the real world notion of speed. Does browser XYZ allow me to do every day things faster than the other browsers I have installed? That's the question I ask and when put to the test I find that Firefox wins every single time.

This is why I've also always bumped Firefox for its extension power and customisation because once people understand how much power there is, they will save themselves bursts of time which when added up make a bigger chunk of time saved.

Just like overtaking a car doing 70 in front, the more cars you overtake in bursts the more ground you cover and the more time that is saved up over the whole journey as a whole.

Example:
Uploading an image I find on a website to my own web hosting space then linking it on a forum. On any other browser this process could take more than 30 seconds as you download the image, open the ftp client, upload it, browse to the directory in the browser, copy the URL then paste it into a forum reply and wrap it in image tags.

On Firefox I right click the image on the website directly thanks to rehost image, select my hosted directory and it uploads and copies the http URL into the Windows clipboard. All I then have to do is right click on a forum reply and select BBCode > Image > Paste from clipboard and there it is, wrapped in image tags. Takes seconds in total.

Or if it's a local file then just use FireFTP which also copies http URL to clipboard.

^ That's just one example of a few extensions that save me a whole load of time daily. There are many more and other people have lots of other neat ways to do things thanks to Firefox.
 
I don't know if Firefox is particularly fast or not but I'm using it. It is fast enough for what I want it to do. It is the only browser which meets my needs, in terms of addons and, thus, functionality. Using the Keyfox extension to launch KeePass works a treat.

Opera (both 11.xx and the 12 alphas) are ok but, for me, even though the Opera team seem to be quite innovative, the browser seems shockingly bad with compatibility issues and random crashes, particularly in the Wahoo version.

Chrome runs really well, but, I am not sure why, I simply do not like how it looks and the themes seem to do very little to change that.

IE9 works very well but again I keep going back to FF due to the addons I use.

So for functionality Firefox has served me well over the many years I have been using it and I have yet to find any compelling reason to change.
 
Mattus said:
That is a steaming heap of absolute horse manure.

So even if you have 16GB of RAM, you should steer clear of Chrome because it might use 1.5GB of RAM when you open lots of tabs up?! Of course it matters how much RAM you have. How can a program reach the limit of the system's memory management capability when it's using less than 10% of the system's memory? There's no magic way for a browser to induce excessive paging when it's using a small proportion of system resources.

Also, why does it matter at all whether your browser is running 1 thread or 10 from a reliability perspective? Threads don't 'run wild'. The scheduler is designed to cope with this. The mere fact that you have 10 extra threads running won't make an appreciable difference to your system's performance, let alone reliability. I have a strong suspicion that the author doesn't really know what a thread is.

One of the worst things about the Internet is that anyone can be a 'journalist' in an instant - even hapless cretins who don't know the first thing about their subject matter.
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I am wondering the same thing, she states she is using win7 in the article, yet appears to be describing memory allocations from the twelve year old OS, win XP.
Article seems confused into the only thing worth looking for in a browser is how well is handles memory, that isn't the only factor I'd be looking for.
 
An article of FUD.

Anyone that speaks poorly of Windows' memory management or multi-threading capabilities isn't worth listening to. NT was designed by the same guy (Dave Cutler) that made VMS which was the first mainstream OS to support virtual memory. Yes Windows 32-bit had limits, as all 32-bit OSes did, but these limits no longer exist on Windows x64. The 2GB user space per process is gone. The handle count limiits are gone.
 
NathanE said:
An article of FUD.

Anyone that speaks poorly of Windows' memory management or multi-threading capabilities isn't worth listening to. NT was designed by the same guy (Dave Cutler) that made VMS which was the first mainstream OS to support virtual memory. Yes Windows 32-bit had limits, as all 32-bit OSes did, but these limits no longer exist on Windows x64. The 2GB user space per process is gone. The handle count limiits are gone.
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32bit programs still have 32bit limits.

Also I remember reading an article on Firefox and it too is having issues with the limits imposed on it by being a 32bit program.
 
firefox takes way too long to load to be usable for me anything over 2 seconds and i'm clicking again...

IE is so slow i cry

chrome all the way its still slow but not as slow as the others...

instant for me is < 0.5 seconds even thats a bit annoying...

infact internet + pc = unusable, i usually use the ipad for internet now... I jsut cannto wait 3 weeks for my PC to boot
 
Get with the times, get with an SSD^. No difference in browser start times then.
 
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