Real-world tests have finally confirmed what most of us thought anyway and that is from an actual and perceived speed comparison point-of-view, Google’s Chrome is the fastest browser for the Internet and Safari is the slowest of the main four.
On the graph below, the blue bar represents the total page load time (i.e. after everything has loaded on the page including the hidden stuff) and the green bar represents when you actually believe the page is loaded (i.e. after all the visible parts of the page have loaded on your screen). The graph shows Chrome 12 which was replaced with an even faster version, Chrome 13 last week.
Even these figures though don’t show the whole picture, for those of you that use several browsers on a regular basis (we use different browsers to ensure cross browser compatibility for the web sites we develop) we see even bigger speed differences than this graph suggests. In our experience Chrome is the fastest, then Firefox then chugging along behind is IE. To be fair to Microsoft, IE9 has improved things significantly but still not enough.
Chrome and Firefox for a while have had between them more market share than IE, one of the reasons IE still has a reasonable following is that it’s pre-loaded on Windows and is still used heavily by Corporates. Since Microsoft were forced to include the Browser Choice program when you buy a new PC, they’ve lost market share at an alarming rate as people realise there are better alternatives.
One of the other reasons that Chrome is growing so rapidly is its clean and uncluttered interface and that it can be used across different operating systems, therefore giving a consistent experience across Windows, Mac and Linux.
Links
What’s the Fastest Web Browser in the “Real World?” Chrome – TechCrunch, 8th August 2011
Top 5 Worldwide Browser Usage Stats 2008-2011 – StatCounter
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