Many of you will have seen Chrome released by Google yesterday which comes hot on the heels of Firefox 3 (FF3) coming out a couple of months ago and a week or two ago IE8 Beta 2 hit the streets.
The browser market has never been hotter and Web 2.0 is the reason why. More than ever the browser is now the delivery platform for applications rather than just static HTML. In the “old days” the browser didn’t matter - IE6 had a killer market share and most of your processing happened on the server anyway, so the browsers performance was less of an issue.
That’s changed. I actually posted on this here back in May talking about the need for companies and individuals to actually start thinking about which browser they use and why.
Without getting to technical, one of the core elements of most web sites and what we know as a web 2.0 experience these days is JavaScript. All this means is that much of the processing on what an application does, the popups, the validation, the lookups etc. have been moved to the browser and run within the browser instead of the server. Logically then, the place to start in understanding how well a browser performs is understanding how fast it executes JavaScript.
So for those left-brained thinkers, here is some figures for comparison. They show the average speed each browser takes to execute a standard series of benchmark tests from http://webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-driver.html over 10 iterations. They’ve all been tested on the same PC (mine) so they should be relative, your own mileage may vary but the relationship between the performance should stay the same.
Browser (Speed)
IE8 Beta 2 (12,318ms)
FF3 (4,473ms)
Chrome (2,293ms).
Clearly Chrome is fastest (2X the speed of FF3) so I should just use Chrome, right?
Wrong. There is a lot more to it than that. To put some perspective on this, IE6 which is what many corporates still use benchmarks at around 60,000ms, so even IE8 Beta 2 is quite a bit faster.
The problem is that when your using a browser internally it’s probably controlled by IT, so you may not be able to change it. Even if you can, browser standards actually tend to cause lazy developers (why develop a site to support different browsers when you know that everyone uses IE6 and you can control that) which means lots of internal sites break with FF3 and Chrome.
IE6 was such a bad browser and broke so many standards that even Microsofts early official name for the IE8 backwards compatibility mode is “Quirks mode”!
So here’s where the difference comes in; all modern browsers (IE8, Chrome and FF3) now support the same standards and HTML to a much stricter degree than ever before so moving forwards, it’s highly likely that sites will work whichever browser you use, but in the internal world, you’ll undoubtably have sites that require older compatibility modes.
My solution to this is to use IE8 beta 2 for internal websites in general because of its excellent support for older style sites and its general robust compatibility. If you’re an average internet user and like low fuss options, IE8 has a lot going for it. Just be warned that you’ll likely run into internal IT support issues if you try deploy it inside the corporate firewall (for example, it wants to update Service Packs on Windows XP and some companies won’t be on SP3 yet).
For external sites I’m opting for Chrome - the raw speed and excitement, the new take on what a browser should behave and look like, and (the killer for me) the process seperation (each browser tab runs as a seperate process using seperate memory) means that bad applications in one tab won’t kill my performance. Ignoring the process bit, that’s my right-brain talking; it’s all about the look and feel and the internet looks and feels more exciting in Chrome 
As far as FF3 is concerned, it’s still a great browser but I’ve had shocking stability issues with it. Where FF3 wins hands down is in it’s Add-In market. If you’re a die hard browser and like lots of nifty productivity enhancements, then for now at least, FF3 is a better browser than Chrome.
Chrome adds a really interesting new dimension to the browser wars and I’m really interested to see where this goes. Hope this is of interest to you, happy browsing!
