A Geek's Opinion

Now this is going to be an interesting review. I have used everyone of this browsers in their previous builds, so am particularly keen to get this underway.

Now since I already had Safari 4 I had to install the others. Firefox as per normal installed really quickly, but as for Opera it took a bit to get going. Hopefully it does not get beat by IE8. Sorry I am not a big fan of Internet Explorer.

For my browser tests I am using Futuremarks Pacekeeper Browser benchmark. A very unique tool.

The first right out of Pacekeepers oven was Safari 4 with a score of 4177. Because it had raised the bar yesterday with IE8 I knew Firefox and Opera would have to be quick.

It was pointed out to me yesterday that Safari is a RAM hungry beast, so to make my tests fair I took a look at how much RAM they each chewed. All these results are based on idle. (0%-5% CPU usage).

That is a lot of RAM. That is what we called ridiculous… But if you have plenty of RAM you should be right.

That’s better.

That’s bad but not as bad as Safari.

Okay now onto the results…

If you click on the image you will get a better view.

As we can all see Safari 4 is still the fastest Browser out there. But you have to have to the RAM to go with it. Firefox is a very good browser. I personally would recommend it, because it doesn’t use a lot of RAM and it is still quick. Opera did beat IE8 but it still likes a lot of RAM. So who wins?

I am not handing the winning title to anyone. There are really two winners. For people with a older system and not a whole lot of RAM go for Firefox but if you have the RAM get Safari 4. As for Opera, I feel it is getting better the ideas are good but it need the speed to go with it.

But wait I forgot Chrome, So I will have another review coming up today to see how polished Chrome version 2 really is. Will it make Safari use all the RAM I have got? I hope not.