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I spent the last month doing my internship at zarafa.com developing a S/MIME encryption and signing solution for their open source outlook compatible platform. Living around web developers we almost daily talk (read complain) about browser speeds, especially firefox. I decided to do some benchmarking to prove which is the fastest browser now, on my ubuntu linux 9.04 machine and here are the results...
About the machine:
I have a Dell laptop running ubuntu linux 9.04 (32bit) on a Intel Core2 T7200 @ 2.0Ghz with 2Gb of RAM. I use the proprietary nvidia driver version 180.
About the browsers under test:
The browsers under test are: Firefox 3.5.2 (shipped with ubuntu), Swiftfox 3.5.2 (Firefox optimized for Prescott processors), Firefox 3.5.3 Windows (under wine), Midori 0.1.10, Arora 0.9.0, Epiphany 2.26.1 and last but not least Chromium 4.0.211.0
About the tests:
Three popular tests: Futuremark's Peacekeeper, Google's V8 benchmark, Webkit's Sunspider Benchmark
About the procedure:
I just run the tests without using by machine for anything else. I'm not claiming that this is a scientific research but you get some interesting figures!
Results:
Google V8 Benchmark
Clearly the winner here is the Chromium browser, which uses the same javascript engine as Google Chrome (but apparently is available for linux) and webkit for the rendering. Second with only 60% of Chromium's speed is midori, a new webkit based gtk browser. Third another webkit implementation using QT named Arora. Firefox sadly is 90% slower than the winner! Swiftfox, which is an optimized version of firefox did a little better but still quite bad. The most annoying part is the Firefox running under wine is faster than the native firefox build, which clearly shows that the mozilla guys are paying more attention to their windows users. Well epiphany is there to prove that Firefox's engine, Gecko, hasn't improved that much speed wise.
Webkit's Sunspider Benchmark
Less is better for this benchmark so again Chromium proves it's speed. Midori comes second again with 60% of Chromium speed as in the first benchmark. Firefox (under wine of course!) beats Arora only for a few points but still is more than 50% slower than the first. Epiphany scores really bad on this, almost 5 times the speed of Chromium.
Futuremark's Peacekeeper Benchmark
Not many things change on Peacekeeper benchmark. The positioning is the same, with Chromium coming first, Midori second and Arora reclaiming the third place. Midori is only 17% slower than Chromium for this benchmark, while Arora is 40% and the Firefox family around 60%. Epiphany is there because we love it, not because it's fast
Conclusions
Chromium is fast! Uses a really cool javascript engine and the best rendering engine around so it's more or less expected to come first. The interesting outsider project is Midori. It's fast, lightweight and it's being worked on daily basis to become more stable and feature full. The 0.1.10 is actually usable, previous releases kept crashing, and although there are some rough edges here and there the browser is great! Definitely a winner if you want speed but you don't like chromium's futuristic interface. Arora is on a good path, the QT alternative for midori for all you KDE users. Firefox family, mozilla family, once you used to have a decent browser, but lately keeps crashing, is slooooow and needs some serious love! Keep on working on that. And hey, don't forget that linux users want firefox too! It's really really annoying to see the windows version under wine runs faster.
You can download Midori from their website or from launpad PPA for ubuntu packages. Chromium website and PPA packages, Arora website and PPA packages and Swiftfox website (with packages).
