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Appendix to What's the Fastest Browser on the Mac? Across Platforms?

Dan Knight - 2005.02.14

The charts below are adapted from Browser Speed Comparisons and reduced to fit this page. "Supplementary" browsers are not shown, and colors are used to differentiate operating systems. Color code:

  • Mac OS X: red
  • Mac OS 9: green
  • Linux: yellow
  • Windows XP: blue

On each of these graphs, the shorter bar represents faster performance. Click any chart to see a full-sized version (size about 40K per chart).

Cold Start Speed

The fastest-launching browser is Camino 0.8 for Mac OS X, and three of the four fastest launching browsers are OS X-only. iCab 2.9.8 for Mac OS 9 also makes the top ten. The Mac does very well in this test.

Warm Start Speed

Windows can leave programs partially memory-resident after you quit them, letting them relaunch faster than a cold start. That said, the fastest browser relaunch comes from Konqueror 3.2 (KDE) on Linux - and iCab 2.9.8 takes second place. Internet Explorer 5.1 under OS 9 also makes the top ten, but none of the OS X browsers do.

That said, once you launch a browser in OS X, there's really no reason to quit and relaunch it - you can just leave in inactive in the background.

Rendering CSS

When it comes to displaying a page that uses Cascading Style Sheets, top honors go to Safari 2.0 for Mac OS X 10.4 (based on the current prerelease version). The next-fastest OS X browser in this test is Safari 1.2, which takes 12th place. As Safari 2.0 demonstrates, there's lots of potential to improve speed on the other Mac browsers.

Rendering Table

A lot of pages on the Web are created as tables - that's the old fashioned way and the way we still do things at Low End Mac. Opera 6.03 for Linux is fastest here, followed by the Windows version. Opera 8.0 is the fastest OS X browser and holds 7th place, and Safari 1.2 rates 10th. OS X browsers generally lag well behind Windows browsers, so there's real room for improvement here.

Script Speed

Scripting is very common on the Web, and when it comes to running scripts, Opera is king - the top five browsers in this test are versions of Opera on Linux, Windows, and OS X. Opera 8.0 for OS X takes 5th place, and Safari 2.0 for OS X 10.4 takes 10th. This is one area where Mac browsers really need to improve.

Multiple Images

Displaying images is where Mac OS X excels. The four browsers that scored fastest on the multiple images benchmark were all OS X ones, and seven of the fastest 10 browsers run on OS X. This is where AltiVec really pays off, because the G4 tested runs at only half the clock speed of the Pentium 4 in the Windows and Linux machines.

History Benchmark

Hitting the Back button in your browsers may display the last page nearly instantaneously - or it may take several seconds to redisplay it. Opera 8.0 for Windows wins this test, with Opera 8.0 for Mac taking third place and the Linux version holding the fourth spot. Three of the ten fastest browsers in this test run under OS X - so do four of the slowest five.

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