So today in the UK we’ve been told that the raw price of petrol has dropped 25% yet we’re paying more. Recently here at 227 Volts we’ve been talking about beta browsers. What do those two have to do with the price of fish? Petrol makes you go and browsing is all about who can go fast, so here we go…who goes fastest?
Google Chrome (on my VMware Fusion image – as there is still no mac support) starts a bit slow the first time but when you start it back up for the second, third and future times, she zooms. Firefox is ok at starting and Internet Explorer – due to all of the integration (or so I’m guessing) is the most sluggish.
Now, lets go browsing. We load up some tabs with content and guess what – Firefox ranks LAST. Yep, surprised? I was. Again Chrome was the snappiest and IE came in a close second.
How about the Acid test – CSS & JavaScript. Hmm, no contest here. IE the slowest, but then again, they tried to re-write the HTML spec themselves with marquee tags and the like a few years back. Hard to teach an old dog new tricks, or even worse make him adhere to someone else’s tricks in this case 
Last we look at memory. Again IE is the most sluggish, but again it integrates itself the heaviest in to the core of the OS allowing Windows Desktop Search functionality from the browser. Firefox is the least memory intensive, but if it crashes, you lose it all, whereas I’m betting the reason Chrome takes that little bit more memory is because it makes each tab independent, so in the case of a crash you lose that tab and only that tab. Not a bad idea Google…
So, overall what does that say? For integration, functionality and features at the price of memory, use IE. For the best in the business, it seems Chrome is the man with the plan. However, when you’ve got a Mac, you don’t have many options, unless you use VMware Fusion or go down the Firefox route…
