Benchmark

Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Apple Safari -- the Big Five browsers out there.  But which one is the best?  There's a lot of reviews on the matter but at the end of the day, it's a question of which browser meets your requirements as a user -- which one is best for your computer.

I've come across this neat website that lets you compare the performance of different browsers on your computer. And for this particular machine that I am using right now (a Pentium 4 2.80GHz desktop), the test gave the following results (click for a larger image):

[caption id="attachment_298" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="on a Pentium 4 2.80GHz desktop"][/caption]

Safari rocked the tests overall, and topped the Social Networking and Data categories. Chrome was a close second, topping the Rendering and Text Parsing categories. Chrome also topped the Complex Graphics test, but results from this test weren't considered in the overall results because the technology used wasn't supported yet by all major browsers (which I guess is why IE scored zero on this).  Internet Explorer scored miserably in all categories. See below for details. (See their FAQ for details on the individual tests)

Firefox's scores were mediocre compared to the top 2, but what makes it shine is that it's open-source. So as a result, lots of useful extensions/add-ons have been developed for it.  For instance, it supports a Gmail notifier that can manage multiple accounts.  I've stuck to Firefox for so long just because of this one add-on. Only recently did I discover a similar extension for Chrome, which made me switch.  Safari would've won me over, but it lacked this feature.