Comments on: Opera 9 shown to be fastest browser in yet anther speed test

By: Alan Robinski

Alan Robinski — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:10:22 +0000

Opera is the fastest browser on Windows, but Safari for Mac is faster.

By: LXj

LXj — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 08:21:14 +0000

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)

By: Alex Bishop

Alex Bishop — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:11:03 +0000

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

By: Daniel Goldman

Daniel Goldman — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 14:58:25 +0000

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.

By: pat

pat — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 12:12:37 +0000

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.

By: Mike Aizatsky

Mike Aizatsky — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:45:18 +0000

Just a note: this numbers are for selector speed test: http://extjs.com/playpen/slickspeed/

By: Mike Aizatsky

Mike Aizatsky — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:44:48 +0000

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.

By: ResearchWizard

ResearchWizard — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 03:34:22 +0000

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

By: Remember

Remember — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 18:03:55 +0000

Actually, Safari 3.0.2 was twice as fast as Opera 9.22 every time

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?

By: dArt

dArt — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:54:45 +0000

My results are aleays ~1000. Dunno why, maybe i use to many features.

By: sid

sid — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:45:29 +0000

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.

By: Randy Magruder

Randy Magruder — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:37:11 +0000

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.

By: Robin

Robin — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:36:50 +0000

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?

By: Chuck Monroe

Chuck Monroe — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:08:47 +0000

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?

By: Chuck Monroe

Chuck Monroe — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:03:28 +0000

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.