OS X Browser Speed Wars: May the Fastest App Win

Michelle Delio — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:59:34 -0500

No matter how happy you are with your current Web browser, chances are you’ve wondered if another browser would make your Web wanderings faster, easier, or at least a little more festive. We speculate about that too (probably far too often), so we decided to run some tests, compare features and figure out which browser currently rules the Web.

The Lineup

Browsers are powered by engines which transform a raw mess of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a more or less tidy website. Mac browsers typically use the Mozilla Gecko or Webkit engines. Opera uses its own proprietary engine, Presto.

Current releases of Mozilla Gecko-based browsers for the Mac include:

Firefox 3.5.1: Once the geeky alternative, now almost mainstream, known for its customizability
Flock 2.5: A browser for the socially-minded Mac user
Camino 1.6.8: Firefox, basically, but tweaked for Macs

Current Webkit-based browsers include:

Safari 4.0.2: Apple’s very own browser.
Stainless 0.6.5: Cool features for the technically inclined (under development).
Cruz 0.2: For the social networker who likes to multi-task (under development).

If a browser has not yet reached version 1.0, we didn’t include it in our overall benchmark scoring as it could have skewed the results. Early-stage stripped-down betas can appear superfast, and could lack some functions that can skew benchmark-based comparisons.

Testing Methodology

To gauge basic performance levels we used Mozilla's Dromaeo JavaScript testing suite which aggregates a number of tools including Dromaeo, Apple's SunSpider suite and Google's V8. We measured CPU/Memory usage with iStat pro. Streaming video playback was determined by comparing how smoothly the same set of three YouTube videos played in each browser.

We installed freshly-downloaded copies of each browser and tested on a Mac Pro (2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 8GB of SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7) and a MacBook Pro (2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 8GB SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7). Each browser ran in its default configuration with no third-party plug-ins and a minimum set of bookmarks. That’s the closest we could get to creating a level playing field but there’s a flaw here: over long-term usage, a browser’s performance may slow as information is added to its database, extensions can also bog things down.

Bottom line: Benchmarks are not the Voice of God. There are too many variables that come into play, such as network latency when testing browsers. And while a sluggish but feature-rich application is not a good application, features and functionality matter far more to most of us than whether a browser can load 15 tabs a few fractions of a second faster than another browser.

Test results

General Performance:

Overall, Safari was the fastest of all the browsers we tested, with Camino a hair behind Safari.

Firefox exhibited the slowest startup times of any tested browser, but beats Safari by an average of two seconds in speedy page rendering, primarily due to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Opera was a bit faster than Firefox on start-up times but really shone in the tab-tests -- opening up eight, and then 15 tabs faster (but we’re talking percents of seconds here) than the other browsers. Safari was the next fastest on the tab test, with Firefox and Camino neck in neck near the back of the pack.

Flock didn’t score well at all, coming in dead last in all tests but its capabilities not its performance are what makes this browser attractive to some.

Resource Usage We tested each browser by opening 15 tabs -- nine of them flash-heavy -- and checked CPU and memory usage in iStat pro after 10, 20, and 30 minutes.

Firefox, Safari and Opera did the best on this test; Firefox showed 9% CPU utilization at 30 minutes, Safari and Opera had consumed 11%. Camino was in second-to-last place, with a 13% CPU utilization score. Flock ate up the most resources, spiking to 15% on occasion.

None of the browsers gobbled enough resources to create a performance lags in other applications or the browser.

NEXT: Video Playback, Features Compared and Your Next Browser.

Video Playback:

All of the browsers rendered good playback of three YouTube videos, with the glaring exception of Firefox 3.5.1 which stuttered disturbingly. Having run into this issue before, we were not surprised; some folks suspect the problem is due to Firefox’s crash recovery system which takes frequent snapshots of the browser’s state. (In case you’re experiencing this problem, a previous experiment in about:config changing the browser.sessionstore.interval from 10000 to 120000 alleviated the issue somewhat, but not entirely.)

The Results

Looking at all these scores as a whole, Safari is leading the pack but there’s just not enough of a significant difference to crown one browser as the ultimate for everyday use. So let’s have a look at what features each contender offers:

Firefox: Firefox has morphed from the scrappy little renegade browser to a solid -- dare we say unexciting? -- workhorse. Not that this is a bad thing, Firefox 3.5.3 manages to combine stable, fast performance with the widest range of user-customizable features of any browser. None of Firefox’s newer features are astounding (TraceMonkey is its biggest tech advantage) it’s the ability to tweak every component of the browser that is its main technical appeal. If you don’t love tinkering with settings and plug-ins and scripts, it’s difficult to make a case for Firefox over Safari on a Mac.

Camino: So you like Firefox, but wish it was more Mac-like? Download Camino and you’ll have a 100% open source browser, built on the Gecko engine and optimized for use on Macs. You can access native Mac OS X features such as the services menu and system Keychain. Camino 1.6.9 offers Firefox’s uber-customability, built-in Flashblock and “Annoyance Control” pop-up stopper, Session Restore and other Firefox-like features for a solid but bloat-free browser that often delivers better performance on Macs than the Fox. (Camino 2.0 Beta 3 is already reasonably stable and includes some great features: enhanced AppleScript capabilities, Growl notifications for completed downloads, drag and drop tabs, and the ability to disable "Block Flash animation" on a per-site basis). The only thing that’s missing: Camino doesn’t have a built-in RSS feed reader, it hands off feeds to the reader of your choice.

Safari: If you’re running Leopard on your Mac, you’ll likely get the best overall performance from Safari or Camino. Among Safari’s recently introduced features, you’ll either love Cover Flow, a 3D view of your most frequently accessed web pages or dismiss it as eye candy. In general, we find the starred indications of new content useful, but would prefer to choose the sites displayed in Cover Flow rather than have them automatically populated. Safari’s full history search (look on the lower right-hand corner of the Top Sites window) makes it easy to find sites you’ve visited before, even if you only remember a word or two that appeared on the page. Private browsing keeps your strolls through the Web’s less brightly lit neighborhoods off the grid. Safari supports plug-ins, but is less customizable than Firefox.

Opera: Poor little Opera really doesn’t get the attention it deserves, possibly because some people still think you have to pay to get a copy and it doesn’t appeal to geeky early adopters as it isn’t open source. It’s a shame because Opera 10 boasts super-snappy performance and is packed with great features including Speed Dial, which serves the same purpose as Safari’s Top Sites but is far more configurable, built-in page compression to speed page downloads over slow or cruddy connections, a nice-looking tab bar that suits wide screen monitors and displays pretty thumbnails of each tab’s contents and a great email client, etc. Try Opera 10 with Opera Unite, which adds a streamlined web server to Opera for media sharing. We just wish that it had a privacy mode.

Flock: Flock is for the extroverts among us, as well as introverts who are pretending to be the sort of people that need people. It’s a tad sluggish compared to Safari, Opera and Firefox/Camino, but it excels at social networking. To share content you drag and drop photos, videos, URLs, chunks of text or whatever else onto a friend’s Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or other profile in Flock’s People Sidebar. You can update your own Facebook newsfeed in a similar fashion, and drag content right into Facebook chats. Twitter Search is baked in, and FlockCast lets you post to multiple locations simultaneously, type a URL in a Twitter message and Flock automatically shortens it, and etc. It really is a well-thought out browser for its target audience. But unless you make a living doing social media, you might want to boot up another browser for the days when you actually have to get work done.

Your Next Browser

Google Chrome: Chrome for OS X comes with a stern warning that it’s not at all suitable for daily use from stability and functionality standpoints. And while we’re used to Google’s offerings being Beta forever, this one really is in its early days. It’s impossible to predict how the final version will measure up to existing browsers, but it looks very promising -- the speediest browser we’ve seen so far, in fact. Each tab runs as an independent process, so if one page crashes the browser won’t throw a hissy fit. If you can set aside your bitterness over Google making us wait so long for Chrome, this browser may be your favorite once it hits version 1.0 -- maybe in a few months. Meanwhile the brave can preview it here.

Cruz: Cruz was created for OS X 10.5 Leopard and later, by Todd Ditchendorf, who also created Fluid. Todd bills it as a social networking browser but it’s also great for multi-taskers, you can create panels along each side of the central browser window and fully load websites in each panel, and you can configure links in the panels to open in the main window (or within a new tab in the main window). Fluid underpinnings provides a lot of potential options here, and the tech savvy can use scripting and plugins to make Cruz their own. It also supports session saving as well as site screenshot thumbnails, which may become more useful as more sites implement it. Cruz is a very early beta but it’s already reasonably stable.

Stainless: Stainless started life as a proof-of-concept, quickly gained fans and is slowly becoming a real browser. Now at version 0.6.5, Stainless offers features sure to delight people who thrill to the idea of things like parallel sessions -- thanks to Stainless’ use of multiprocessing, you can log into a site using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time -- a boon for those of us who have multiple accounts that we can’t log into in one tab without being logged out in the other. Like Chrome, each tab runs as an independent process. Stainless also boasts a porn private browsing mode, a 'Bookmark Shelf' that lets you park favicon links on the sides of the browser window, and session aware bookmarking. Its developers freely admit this is not a browser for everyday use yet (and in testing Stainless did create a lockup that required a hard boot to clear) but it looks promising and is a little speed demon on multi-core machines.

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OS X Browser Speed Wars: May the Fastest App Win