VoIP & Gadget News – Browser Benchmark Battle Begin! Chrome vs. IE 9 vs. Firefox

Browser Benchmark Battle Begin!

It’s Chrome vs. IE 9 vs. Firefox. CNET did some benchmarks comparing the browsers on memory usage, boot time, JavaScript, HTML5, and more. Browser users are a loyal bunch. You can’t tell a Firefox fan that Google Chrome is better and vice-versa. Internet Explorer was the darling years ago when it overtook Netscape. However, many would argue it was never a “darling” since it took over marketshare by bundling IE with the operating system and many Internet fans were upset that Netscape was essentially destroyed by Microsoft. So there is a rabid anti-Microsoft and anti-Internet Explorer mindset out there. The only way Microsoft is going to win back users is by having better features and better performance. So did IE make up some ground? As Warner Wolf would say, Let’s go to the videotape!

Here’s one benchmark graphic. (Courtesy: CNET):

I personally use Firefox 4. Honestly, I’d probably switch to Chrome, but I keep 40 Firefox tabs open all the time and unfortunately Chrome uses more memory since it uses separate processes for each tab. Firefox on the other hand uses a single process that is shared by all the tabs thereby “sharing” some of the execution code, while Chrome has to duplicate the code across each process. Though the one drawback of Firefox is that it has a slow memory leak so over the course of a day or two, the process goes from using 500MB to 1.6GB of RAM forcing me to restart it because my PC starts swapping to the hard drive making it a real dog.

So who won this epic battle of the browsers? Surprisingly, Mozilla’s Firefox 4 won this round, which will no doubt result in Chrome & IE fans claiming the test was skewed or something. But you can read the full results here.

Tags: browser, chrome, firefox, google, internet explorer, javascript, mozilla, netscape
Related tags: benchmark battle, internet explorer, battle begin, browser benchmark, firefox, chrome