web browser grand prix
Every so often, Tom’s Hardware runs what it calls a “Web Browser Grand Prix,” putting the latest browsers through a battery of grueling benchmarks.
The last throwdown took place in August, and was notable for its inclusion of a “hackintosh” computer, except that wasn’t enough for Mac-heads, who worried the results might be biased for lack of an authentic Mac in the mix.
Until today: TH just published one of its multipage, exhaustive benchmark features, pitting Chrome 16, Firefox 9, Internet Explorer 9, Opera 11 and Safari 5 against each other. The test machine? An 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.8GHz Intel Core i7 processor running OS X Lion and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (via Apple’s Boot Camp) — about as apples-to-apples as you’ll get in cross-platform Mac/Windows testing.
The results are fascinating if you have time to comb through them, derived from what TH calls “core, observation, dated, and quarantine” tests, each keyed and weighted to reflect TH’s experience with the benchmarks and how trustworthy their results are.
The tests consist of routine activities, ranging from startup times and cached or uncached page loads to each browser’s chops running stuff like Java, Silverlight, Flash and HTML5.
And the winners: On Windows 7, Firefox 9 (Safari took last place) and on OS X, Safari 5 (Firefox took last place). But here’s the interesting bound-to-be-contentious part — the overall winner was Firefox 9 on Windows 7.
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