Gap Widens Between Open Source Browsers and Others

On the OStatic blog today I covered some of the early benchmarking results appearing for Release Candidate 1 of version 8 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.  The speed results from ZDNet Australia that I discussed there are corroborated by other testers, including DownloadSquad.

Depending on which tests you look at, Internet Explorer is between two times and four times slower than the top-notch open source browsers Mozilla Firefox (version 3.1 beta 1) and Google Chrome. Most of the discussion in my post today was about the expanded prospects for these browsers, but how are Safari and Opera stacking up?

Because many of the readers of WebWorkerDaily are Mac-based, I know that there are quite a few Safari users in the readership. And, on occasions when I’ve posted about Opera, readers have posted love letters about it, noting its speed in particular.

However, if you check ZDNet Australia’s benchmarks, you’ll find Opera lagging Firefox and Chrome significantly in critical tests such as JavaScript performance. I’ve made the point before that JavaScript performance may become critically important to web workers who use online hosted applications, because those applications are set to change as next-generation browsers get faster at handling them. Some are even predicting that advanced JavaScript performance could start threatening standard web tools such as Flash.

Safari, like Google Chrome, is based on the Webkit rendering engine, so it has reasonable performance, but still tends to lag Firefox 3.1 and Chrome significantly. With Firefox 3.1 set to come out in release candidate version in a matter of weeks, and with all the useful extensions for it, I see no reason to favor any other browser. Meanwhile, Chrome is coming out soon in Mac and Linux versions. The Mac version, in particular, is worth watching for Mac-based readers.

It appears that we are seeing large gaps in key areas open up when it comes to the open source browsers versus the proprietary ones. Apple and Microsoft should be paying very close attention to all of this, and all web workers will want to watch the flurry of new browser releases slated for the coming weeks and months very closely.

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