Firefox vs. Safari
November 20, 2005Here is my completely unscientific, very Spartan benchmark between Safari and Firefox for the Mac. I used to complain like hell about how slow Firefox was on the Mac (boottimes of 20+ seconds)– but I did notice a huge speed increase in the Firefox 1.5 betas. The improvements are simply stunning. My crude ‘benchmark’ shows that Firefox is by far no longer the slower of the two.
Test system:
Both applications were launched from the dock, without any extra software running. The time is in seconds, and the first is boottime, and second is the time it takes to load OSNews.com from a submenu in the bookmarks toolbar:
Firefox: 3.37 / 6.93
Safari: 2.20 / 10.53
I hope someone with more time, and more Macs, can conduct some more thorough research on this issue. These few numbers are really interesting. These numbers are however statistically meaningless, seeing I only recorded the times once.
You might want to try saving the OSNews.com page to your hard drive and then have each browser open it. That will at least remove network variables (such as DNS lookup) or any particular lag that you might experience. That would make the test a little bit better.
Comment by pojo — November 20, 2005 @ 7:23 pm
You might mention thatas a subscriber to OSNews, you get the subscriber version, which does NOT include external ads, but does load a live DB query vs. the standard version which comes from the osnews cache.
This way, if anyone should replicate the test, they will know that they can expect different results.
Comment by Adam — November 20, 2005 @ 7:27 pm
I never intended this to be a truly optimal benchmark– it was more of a personal thing. Looking at it from that perspective, it of course makes no sense to eliminate every variable I cannot control (ie. network connection).
However, as soon as I find some time, I may as well do that anyway. Doesn’t solve the problem of my only having one Mac, though.
Comment by Administrator — November 20, 2005 @ 7:32 pm
On the Mac, I use Safari. I know it loads faster, but I think page rendering is about the same, or just simply, indistinguishable between the two. The real reason why I choose Safari, is because scrolling on a page is much-much faster than any other Mac browser.
Comment by Eugenia — November 20, 2005 @ 9:48 pm