Performance Comparison of Major Web Browsers

The latest versions of the five most major web browsers (Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 3.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0, Opera 10.0, and Apple Safari 4.0) went head to head under six performance indicators: JavaScript speed, average CPU usage under stress, DOM selection, CSS rendering speed, page load time, and browser cache performance. Each web browser was tested three times under an unprimed cache (except for the browser cache performance), and their average value reported in the results.

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Download the Data

If you’d like to download the raw data, you can grab them as a CSV below.

• web-browser-performance-data.csv (CSV, 2.0KB)

Benchmarking Tools

• SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
• SlickSpeed (jQuery values reported)
• Numion stopwatch
• CSS Rendering Benchmark
• Resource Monitor

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Sean Hurley of 96Robots for inspiring this study.

Related Content

• The History of Web Browsers
• 10 Ways to Improve Your Web Page Performance
• Can You Be a Web Designer?
• Related categories: Resources and Tools

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