Hello, I am a little skeptical of everyone saying that Chromium, Google Chrome, and Opera are the fastest browsers. What truly is the fastest graphical browser of all? We all know Lynx is the fastest, but that's because it has no images. With so many different browsers available for Linux, I doubt that Chrome and Opera are the fastest:

1. Uzbl
2. Surf
3. Jumanji
4. Links
5. Kazehakaze

But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong and Chrome and Opera actually are the fastest browsers. I just find it very hard to believe. Have any of you guys tried any browsers that you though were the fastest? Have any of you gone out of your way to speed test a bunch of browsers?

I don't know, I haven't personally used anything faster than Chrome or Chromium, unless you count extremely basic things like Dillo.

I don't think Dillo counts because sometimes it doesn't fully render pages. Since I'm planning on getting a new computer, I want to get the perfect browser that can display pages perfectly with absolutely amazing speed. I've heard a lot about Uzbl. Does Uzbl render pages in complete form?

Fast in what way ? Firefox is fast enough for me, and it doesn't come with the issues that Chrome and Opera have.

I think it mostly depends on how fast you think it is. You won't notice an extra 100 ms. I tweaked FF enough that it is about as fast as any other current browser.

Dillo doesn't have javascript support, which extremely limits it.

QTweb maybe?

The word "fastest" is way too broad to make any generic judgment. E.g., it is one thing to load a page up quickly, and another thing to perform well when you have twenty pages open with fifteen JavaScripts running and half the content is cached and all your CSS rendering must be fully complient and twelve of your pages are being served over SSL and two of your pages are using HTML5 video... you get the idea.

For a while, I remember Firefox was lagging a little behind in some of the generic performance tests. However, in the latest versions they've been making some pretty significant improvements: for example, they implemented functionality that automatically throttles up the JavaScript time out period for scripts running in tabs that you aren't focusing on. (In other words, dramatically reducing JavaScript performance impact from pages you aren't looking at.) In the latest version they made some improvements to the JIT compiler which they claim increased performance by thirty percent.

So I guess when you say "fastest" you are going to have to be way more specific. What aspect of the performance you are interested in... what functionality you want... etc.

This is quite interesting. So many people use Firefox, I just deemed it overrated. Can you actually customize Firefox to the point of it being just as fast as Chromium? And yes, it does depend on you system which effects the performance of the browser, I understand.

If you can customize a browser to make it faster, then what is the most customisable browser?

I don't think the question can be answered.

I can build you the fastest browser on earth, which shows only the 10% of all available pages correctly. Would you compare just this 10%, my browser would be the fastest.

Take an average web page. Still the speed of the browser is very much content dependent. Take another page. Even if all browsers render it correctly the outcome might be different.

Opera has always been among the fastest... for 90% of the pages, that is. The next 2% stick Opera with 100% CPU utilization. FF is overall slower, but doesn't get stuck with 99% of the pages.

Chrome is not bad and mostly fast. Small memory footprint as compared to others. But it does use 100% CPU sometimes. At least Google apps are rendered fast and correctly. Duh!

I ended up with using different browsers for different web pages. Opera remains my main browser, but I have to deviate regularly.

jlinkels

I would say that Internet Explorer 5 is clearly the fastest browser I have ever used. That was a long time ago, when I used Windows 98.

On Linux in recent times, I think Chromium clearly is the fastest. But I never use it, I still completely prefer Firefox. The difference is small, so no problem.

I have tried Uzbl and found it fast, but didn't find it really that "usable". I found it awkward and missed some features, some little conveniences, many of them provided by plugins. Instead, I use Firefox with Pentadactyl. It's similar to Uzbl, but has all the perks of Firefox.

Opera feels faster than Firefox too, but I still prefer Firefox. I loathe the tab behavior in Opera, and the rendering is often not very good, the fonts look a little bit weird.

You see, I like speed, but it's obviously not my priority.

fast in doing what ?
every browser is different
and if you believe the MS fud about ie9 then it IS the fastest on MS's html5 test

each will do something better than something else
so there is no answer to " what is the fastest"
other than "all and none "

I would say Firefox is definitely the most customizable, and can be very fast. There is a link in my sig for tweaking, but you can search for more.

IMHO performance remains subjective until you throw tests at web browsers. Somehow people prefer to ignore that in favor of qualifications like "not bad", "fast", "can be very fast" and all that. Why would one be satisfied with opinions when one can have facts? Some test results here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...5,3013-15.html, more specifically http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,2689-13.html, also see http://lifehacker.com/5844150/browse...rer-9-and-more and other test suggestions here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ways-be...s-performance/.

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Window$ 7 vs Mac, interesting, but not useful.

Also, were those Firefoxes tweaked or not ? Probably not.

Criticize all you want but until you come up with some at least I can say I came up with recent numbers.


What are you trying to convey? That FF can only compete if it's tweaked? ;-p