Opera 9 shown to be fastest browser in yet anther speed test
Published July 16th, 2007 11:29 AM EDT By Daniel GoldmanThe Opera browser consistently gets high marks for its speed, so it is no surprise that Opera beat out the other browser in yet another speed test.
The guys over at ExtJS ran a speed test for CSS Selectors, and among IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, and Safari, Opera has been shown to be the fastest. They tested the speed of 5 JavaScript libraries (Ext, jQuery, Dojo, Mootools, and Prototype), and in most instances Opera executed the code in a fraction of time it took the others.
Haven’t tried Opera yet? Is Opera too fast for you?
If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed.





using
Glad to hear that! It pained me to hear Jobs say Safari 3 beat every other browser… To navigate through non-encrypted pages in history, Opera beats everyone hands down.
using
Actually, Safari 3.0.2 was twice as fast as Opera 9.22 every time with http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php - is everyone else getting the same type of result?
using
Browsing speed is nice, but what affects my day to day life is development speed. Until Opera gets a Firebug analogue it won’t come close to speeding my life up in the way that Firefox does, and even then bettering the wealth of other extensions is going to take some doing.
For what it’s worth, Firefox does run awfully on that set of tests. Anyone got a recent nightly of Minefield to test on it?
using
I use and love Opera. However, when I want speed, I do run the Safari beta. It DOES load and render pages faster. I don’t know what the stop watches say and I don’t honestly care, because however they do it, the end result is that the pages load and render faster than Opera 9.2.
Safari is still basically cripleware featurewise and nowhere near as friendly to use as Opera, so Opera is in no danger of me leaving it, but I can’t in good conscience accept benchmarks that deny what is in plain site. Safari DOES load and layout typical pages faster than anything else I’ve used.
using
safari had a problem with date = new Date() geting each time the SAME time. javascript based benchmarks provided exceptional results of some scripts executing in 0.0ms. date object is weird in safari, i believe only in stopwatched results. if you cant measure your sample because it takes 20ms to do it - multiply it by 100 and then use stopwatch
minefield is DAMN FAST, btw.
using
My results are aleays ~1000. Dunno why, maybe i use to many features.
using
Are you sure that this isn’t another case of the Safari bug that led to misleading numbers in Apple’s marketing material for Safari 3?
using
Opera is the slowest and the fastest Browser in my quick and totally unprofessional test on http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php
Opera9.21 (my productive installation with lots of tabs + email etc): 6649 ms
FF2.0.0.4 (tons of extensions, one tab): 4916 ms
IE7 (pretty unused and uncustomized, one tab): 4827ms
Safari 3.02beta Win (pretty unused, one tab): 1052 ms
Opera 9.22 freshly installed: 931 ms
using
I’ve got quite different results on 4-core Mac Pro:
Safari: 115 161 118 87 171
Firefox: 146 355 152 256 306
Opera: 137 215 138 138 146
every test except the last one shows that Safari is faster… I was always looking at Opera claims as being the fastest browser as a cheap marketing hype. It was never as fast as Safari is.
using
Just a note: this numbers are for selector speed test: http://extjs.com/playpen/slickspeed/
using
I don’t have benchmarks to go by but 9.22 is super fast at rendering pages for me. On my machine, Safari beta for Windows did seem faster than 9.21, but I’m not so sure that it’s faster than 9.22. And, of course, there’s no real comparison between the two in terms of function.
using
I’ve run these tests on my computer yesterday, got mostly the same results as those posted on the blog I linked to. There are apparently other factors involved in this test. We obviously all didn’t test on the same Opera installation — we all have modified it a bit, which may contribute to speed changes. Just a thought.
using
I’ve always been deeply skeptical of these sorts of tests, particularly for marketing purposes (because you just choose to test the functionality that your chosen browser is good at and your competitors aren’t) but here’s what I got (Windows XP SP2):
Safari 3.0.2 Beta - 1472ms
Opera 9.21 - 1633ms
Minefield 2007071705 - 5205ms
Firefox 2.0.0.4 - 6399ms
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 - 9974ms
using
Oh, if they tested Opera in Google Reader, it wouldn’t be as fast…
I hope rewrite of JS engine in 9.5 will solve this problem. I use FF only because when Google Reader feeds with lots of articles make Opera consumu 100% CPU (I came to this page from Google Reader, so you see my browser is FF currently)
using
Opera is the fastest browser on Windows, but Safari for Mac is faster.