Firefox 3 Beta 5 Beats Opera 9.5 Beta and Safari 3.1?

By | April 9, 2008 | 16 Comments

After yesterdays Adrian Kingsley benchmark test (Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 vs. Safari 3.1 on Mac OS X), I’ve decided to add Opera 9.5 Beta and run them on Windows machine.
Used latest browsers builds (nightly or weekly, all released on April 8th. So how were the results? They’ve actually shocked me a bit, so here you go:

Firefox 3 Beta 5 vs Opera 9.5 Beta vs Safari 3.1
Less is better (ms)
Click for more advanced stats.

Please note that this is the only one benchmark (JavaScript testing), there are dozens of them…

Firefox 3 Pre, 2008 04 08 Build
Opera 9.5 Beta, Build 9903
Safari 3.1, 525.13.3

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About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • http://my.opera.com/Fyrd Fyrd

    I believe what happened was, Opera optimized their Javascript performance first, becoming the faster than any Safari/Firefox builds at the time. Then Safari did theirs, becoming faster, then finally Firefox 3 did theirs to be better even than Safari.

    Hence these results. Note that this is just testing Javascript performance though, nothing about DOM traversal, HTML, page loading, etc.

  • http://rockstyle.pl Rockstyle

    Hi. How did you make this good lookin’ chart? Pardon my offtopic…

  • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

    I agree with you Fyrd,

    Rockstyle, Microsoft Office

  • http://www.puresimple.net konfusion

    I’m hoping opera will improve, as Firefox seems to heavy to me atm… I like a lot of things about firefox, but I think it’s too clunky (kinda like the analogy of the Firefox being a Hummer with guns on it whereas opera is a nice Aston Martin)

    Although I have to say that Firefox has been bringing in a couple of good thefts from Opera, I still like the latter of the two better.

    PS – @Vygantas: I wrote an email to you through the contacts form about your plugins – I was wondering if you could give me info on the email subscription as well as the contacts form and graphs :D

  • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

    I haven’t received your email (yet).

    Have you used contact form or sent via email? As after cache plugin, had some problems with that form so removed it.

  • http://www.puresimple.net konfusion

    I used the contact form a while back, asking about your contacts form and your email subscription. I don’t actually know your email address… *looks for it*

  • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas
  • eM

    Can you note the actual version/builds used?

  • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

    Sure,

    Firefox 3 pre, 2008 04 08 build
    Opera 9.5 Beta, Build 9903
    Safari 3.1, 525.13.3

  • sgunhouse

    Strangely (for us Linux users), Konqueror 4.x completes the tests but never reports its results. It would be interesting to try to compare Konqueror to the other Linux browsers, but I guess they don’t want us to know …

  • nobody

    speed difference in real life is even bigger than that graph shows

    try this: http://www.gamereplays.org/portals.php?

    menu at the top, drop down one – try to rapidly move mouse over it – in ff3/safari it is completly fluid, in Opera.. well, not. there are many pages, that I always thought of being ‘slow’. now that I use ff3 for my daily browsing I doscover that it was Opera that was slow..

  • sebt

    @nobody, re. gamereplays.org

    The menus seem fast and fluid for me in Opera linux bld. 1887 and the latest windows build, certainly just as fast as Safari/ff3. What build of Opera are you running?

    Apart from particular sites that send less optimised code to Opera, or those that are problematic, Opera 9.5 certainly feels on a par with ff3/safari performance wise. The only exception being ebay, which for some reason always feels slower to load and render even in the latest build of Opera 9.5

    Seb :)

  • deuseggs

    @nobody, nope, menus are instant for me. Opera 9.5 build 9903, not a particularly powerful PC.

  • nobody

    win xp, 9903 build, difference is immense :/ no userjs, no blocked ads, completly fresh install. in ff3/safari I can rapidly browse trough entire menu up and down in less than a secon and all submenus will fold rapidly with no lag, in opera I can clearly see that it takes some time (it is IP.Board that is a js bloat of a board, but still)

    another page, that is exceptionaly slow on opera is gametrailers.com – it is mostly because of extensive use of flash+js there, but still (and videos are often strangely displaced on that page, but that is another problem and affects all browsers)

    on the other hand – gametrailers are VERY slow on ff3 IF you engage page zoom. opera traditionaly slows down with zoom (it is acceptable and expectable) but ff3 slows down to a crawl on this page.

    my rig is c2d e6800, 2gb ram, so it is more than up to date :)

    btw. ebay is slower probably due to various browser.js fixes that are needed there for that page to work. gamereplays has no such fixes.

  • nobody

    and another thing – comment ONLY if you’ve tried it in ff3beta5/safari. that menus are ok only until you see how they behave in these two beforementioned browsers. dont judge on ff2 experience.. ff2 lags horibly there

  • Melis

    Safari will win the war in the future, they’re sponsored by Apple, and they’ll certainly want to have the best browser in the history.
    I’m sure of that, unfortunatelly the money and the economical acquisitions always make the big diference and make larger gaps.

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