speed of HTML browsing

[mytest]

which is faster, Firefox or IE7, at rendering html?

 

[cwdjrxyz]

which is faster, Firefox or IE7, at rendering html?

It will depend partly on what kind of html code is being rendered and
on what OS. In general IE browsers are considered to be some of the
slowest. Firefox, Opera, or Safari for Windows might be fastest,
depending on the code being rendered. I would place my bet on Opera.
However one would have to do timed tests using very different codes,
and a single browser may not be the fastest in all cases. In many
cases when on line the main limiting factor likely is the download
speed provided by the isp. For programs that make thousands of
calculations, the browser may be more important. This might depend on
how fast the various browsers can render thousands of javascript math
calculations, for example.

 

[Adrienne Boswell]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed cwdjrxyz <[email protected]>
writing in @t1g2000pra.googlegroups.com:

It will depend partly on what kind of html code is being rendered and
on what OS. In general IE browsers are considered to be some of the
slowest. Firefox, Opera, or Safari for Windows might be fastest,
depending on the code being rendered. I would place my bet on Opera.

I would agree about Opera - in 2003 I was on dial up at home and DSL at
work. Using Opera, my speed at home was almost as good as my speed at
work. Now, I have cable at home, still DSL at work, and now, my speed at
home is a lot faster than work. Use Opera both places.

dorayme - where are your race cars with browser icons (sponsors)?

 

[Michael Fesser]

..oO([email protected])

which is faster, Firefox or IE7, at rendering html?

Usually Opera, especially 9.5 (alpha).

But there are a lot of other things to consider. For example the early
betas of Safari/Win were quite fast, which is no surprise, because they
left out half of the HTML and CSS standards and almost always failed to
properly render a page (and they were definitely the fastest when
crashing). The same goes for IE, which is quite fast here (IE 6). If you
interpret the standards in an over-simplified way or simply ignore many
parts of it, then of course you can be faster than the competitors.

OTOH my Opera here is a bit slowed-down simply because of the sheer
number of tabs opened simultaneously (more than 100 at the moment) and
the resulting memory usage ...

Micha

 

[dorayme]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed cwdjrxyz <[email protected]>
writing in @t1g2000pra.googlegroups.com:


I would agree about Opera

dorayme - where are your race cars with browser icons (sponsors)?

Funny you should say this, as I was working my way to your post,
I was itching to give the OP my toy race car browser test link.
Your invitation settles the matter!

http://netweaver.com.au/alt/marquee/browserRace.html

Open all your browser windows as wide and as short as possible,
so you can, in effect, race the browsers. Normally one races
cars. But this important marquee code is a means to race
race-tracks themselves, so to speak. It requires some mental
compensation, a minor price to pay for the wealth of information
you can gather about browsers this way. Think how physicists
collide atomic particles to gather very indirect clues to the
nature of the atomic world from the various streaks on their
plates. You too can do this sort of thing. The marquee has been
greatly underestimated as a forensic tool.

I am working on a better browser test that employs both frames
and marquee and blink and a custom DTD in a glorious synthesis. I
am forwarding the designs to the Noble Prize body for
consideration. I am desperate to find Luigi who is in Sweden and
who will go to them and pester them till they agree to a prize
for it. They will give in quickly if Luigi fronts them, there is
nothing surer. I will share this prize with JK, rf and he whose
name I cannot mention.

(Hey, rf, is this the sort of prattle you were referring and
objecting to in the thread on marquees?)

 

[Bone Ur]

Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:50:06 GMT
dorayme scribed:

Think how physicists
collide atomic particles to gather very indirect clues to the
nature of the atomic world from the various streaks on their
plates.

Or how proctologists have you drop your drawers to gather lesserly indirect
clues to the nature of your gastrointestinal world from the various streaks
in your underwear...

You too can do this sort of thing.

Yes, but I don't want to.

(Hey, rf, is this the sort of prattle you were referring and
objecting to in the thread on marquees?)

This is classier.

 

[André Gillibert]

wrote:

which is faster, Firefox or IE7, at rendering html?

The question stated in the header doesn't match this one.

HTML rendering speed isn't the same as browsing speed.
HTML rendering speed measures only a very tiny facet of a browser.
Browsing speed depends on many other important factors:
1) Are the HTTP and HTML engines cooperating correctly so that
time(downloading and rendering)=min(time(downloading),time(rendering))?
(This is rarely the case on old computers)
2) To which extent is it progressively rendering?
3) Does the browser reloads page when pressing back?
4) Does loading background page block the foreground page from being
viewed?
5) Are there bookmark nicknames, keyboard shortcuts, session management
and other time-saving features to go to your favorite sites?
6) Is the history well organized to quickly find a site you went to?
7) DOM modification speed, for DHTML sites.
8) Other factors.

From my experience, IE6 is fast at rendering HTML, but slow at browsing
because back/forward don't use the browser cache properly. Moreover,
there's no "tabbed" browsing, so that, using more than one page at a time
is slow because opening a new window has an overhead and because it's
slower to find which page you want in an unorganized mess of windows.
Avant Browser, Maxthon and a few others "IE front ends" have the same
HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and SSL engines than IE. Subjectively
(objective tests tend to give the most biaised results because they test
only very specific facets of the browser), I can say that Avant Browser
with the IE6 engine has a very good browsing speed... Sometimes, it beats
Opera, mainly because it's better than Opera when JavaScript is
disabled(*), at rendering background pages without blocking foreground
pages.
The experience I had with IE7 has been quite bad. However, Avant Browser
with the IE7 engine is fast on a Pentium IV 1.7Ghz with a good connection.
From my experience, faster than FF 2.x.

There's no single "fastest" browser. The fastest browser is the one with
which you're the most productive on your computer with your connection,
measured in amount of work done in one hour. The fastest browser is
different for every user+computer+connection entity.

(*) You see that the browsing speed depends on the browsing style. *I*
disable JavaScript, but very few people do so. It also depends on the
computer speed and connection speed. FF tends to be bad on old computers
with lagging connections.