Opera aivan tajuttoman hidas

Opera on selkeästi nopein. Ylivoimaisesti. Myös testien mukaan. http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#winspeed

Ok, ok. Firefox and Mozilla are clearly optimised for Linux, and Opera is clearly optimised for Windows. These optimisations are mostly obvious with the loading times, although there is also a little difference in the cache handling on the different operating systems. However, Opera seems to perform admirably well on most tasks, on any platform. When it comes to page rendering (tables, CSS or images), most of the major browsers perform very fast, with very little to distinguish between them. When it comes to scripts, Opera clearly holds its head above the others, nearly twice as fast as the others. The only one that comes close is Safari 2.0, but that is tied to the Tiger release of Mac OS (the recent WebKit nightlies claim to have a 20-30% speed increase on the JavaScript tests I use, but I recorded it taking a second longer - a much faster machine showed a similar slowdown).

Opera also is a clear winner using history. In fact, on Linux it is faster than Mozilla and Firefox for all except starting time. On Mac and Windows, Opera is faster than Mozilla and Firefox for all tasks. Surprisingly, Mozilla is faster at most tasks than Firefox (please don't send me any more emails about this line, I am well aware of why it is faster). Internet Explorer on Windows was either as fast as - or faster than Mozilla and Firefox for most tasks, with the exception of scripts, where it took over twice as long. Internet Explorer 7 is closing the gap a little, but the difference is still noticeable. Of course, its poor standards and security clearly make it a much less attractive prospect. The Moox Firefox install is actually slower than the standard Firefox versions distributed from Mozilla.org, even though it is supposedly optimised for my particular processor. The Mac optimised version is a bit better, but trades performance in one area for performance in another, making little or no difference overall. The performance of K-Meleon and Epiphany was similar to the performance of Mozilla and Firefox on the same platform. The new Netscape Browser preview (based on Firefox) was clearly suffering from bloat caused by the AOL add-ons. Firefox 2 is slower in almost every respect than Firefox 1.5, but this may be due to its being a beta, so it may have debugging settings slowing it down. I will retest Firefox 2 final.

For those of you who commented that security has nothing to do with speed, try saying the same thing after you have spent hours (or days) cleaning malware off your computer, caused by you running an insecure browser. Overall, the time you waste cleaning up malware more than counterbalances the few seconds you save with the faster engine. And as for standards support, well, speed is not much use if pages are forced to be more bloated and therefore slower to load, simply because the engine does not attempt to support current standards. For example, try seeing how much longer it takes to load a page if it is made using several levels of nested tables instead of clean CSS styling, or one that has to use Dean Edwards' IE7 script library just to get the page to render correctly.

From a humorous perspective, it is interesting to note that IE on Windows is slowing down, in the majority of tests. Browsers that use the underlying IE engine (Maxthon or Avant, etc.) generally make IE slower, although Avant manages to make an increase in scripting speed. Opera 6 was also slightly faster at rendering simple pages than Opera 7-9 on windows and linux, but this is easily outweighed by its slow and outdated script support, lack of reflow and progressive rendering, slower image and network handling, and slower history on Mac and Linux. On the other hand, Mozilla has clearly improved a tremendous amount since it's original 1.0 release (which was actually slower in most respects than its Netscape 4 ancestor), but it still has a lot of catching up to do before its scripting engine can match Opera's. And it still has competition. Opera's already faster scripting engine nearly doubled in speed in the 8.0 release, and remains fast in the 9.0 release. Opera 9 is actually very slightly slower than Opera 8 in the JavaScript speed, but because I round the time to the nearest second, you will not see that in the tables. The change in speed seems to be caused by the address bar being visible in the popups test, so hopefully it will not have a noticeable affect on any real Web pages.

One thing I do not take into account here (although it can play a significant role in real pages) is progressive rendering. For example, with Opera 6, the table was laid out faster, but nothing was displayed until the entire table was complete. With Opera 7+, the table takes longer to complete (about half a second), but it is progressively displayed, so the first part is displayed as soon as it is ready, without having to wait for the rest of the table to complete. As a result, you can actually start reading the page faster with Opera 7+. With pages that are served by slow servers (or if you have a slower connection), this can make overall browsing speed significantly faster.

The fastest browsers at starting are the less commonly used Konqueror 3.2 (only on KDE), Camino 0.8 and iCab 2, with Konqueror by far the fastest at a warm start. However, it has one of the slowest script implementations of all the major browsers on Linux, and even though its cache handling is a bit faster on Gnome, its slow startup time on Gnome outweighs the benefit of better caching. The 3.5.3 release was supposed to have performance improvements, but while the startup time has been reduced a little, and CSS is a little faster, this has been at the expense of its history handling and JavaScript engine, which are now even slower than before. The only browsers that are slower at scripts are Opera 6 and Mozilla 1.0, both of which are old releases that have long since been replaced with much faster versions. Camino 1.0 has adopted a newer version of the engine, and now its startup time is much closer to those of the other Gecko browsers (Firefox and Mozilla), so its main advantage has been lost.

Konqueror's sister browsers; Safari 1.2 and OmniWeb are also extremely slow at scripting. IE for Mac is also slow at scripting, and although it is fast enough to start, it is slow for the other tasks. iCab and (old) OmniWeb 4.2 are the clear losers on Mac, with OmniWeb 4.2 being the slowest at tables and CSS, and failing completely to run the script tests. iCab 3 managed to produce the slowest scripting engine time, taking over half an hour - over ten times as long as any other Mac browser, and the slowest CSS time of any current browser, taking nearly 20 minutes (note, also see supplementary Amaya results below). Safari 2.0 has made an impressive advance compared with Safari 1.2, in both scripting and rendering. iCab 3 has made significant advances in its CSS and scripting capabilities, but this has been at the expense of making it perform noticably slower than before at almost all tasks. Supposedly it has not yet been optimised for speed (since it is currently in closed beta), but it has a long way to go, and it is doubtful that any optimisations will make much of a difference.

On Mac OS 9 the browsers generally perform slightly better than the same versions on Mac OS X. However, these versions have long since been left behind by newer and much faster releases that are not available on OS 9. iCab 2 is the fastest at starting but then fails to perform well enough on most of the other tests. iCab 3 may have far better capabilities, but it is slower as a result, and fails at some tasks that iCab 2 managed to perform. The other browsers are generally very slow at scripting, CSS rendering, history, and none of them are particularly fast at starting either.

The java browsers all performed very badly at scripting, most seemed to have a lot of trouble manipulating strings or performing calculations. ICEbrowser, although initially one of the slowest to start, was the clear winner at all other tasks, as well as having the most up-to-date scripting and CSS engines. Clue was clearly the worst browser, failing to run most of the tests. Well, at least I got it to start.
To summarise

So overall, Opera seems to be the fastest browser for Windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice. However, it is still not as fast as Opera, and Opera also offers a high level of standards support, security and features.

On Linux, Konqueror is the fastest for starting and viewing basic pages on KDE, but as soon as script or images are involved, or you want to use the back or forward buttons, or if you use Gnome, Opera is a faster choice, even though on KDE it will take a few seconds longer to start. Mozilla and Firefox give an overall good performance, but their script, cache handling and image-based page speed still cannot compare with Opera.

On Mac OS X, Opera and Safari are both very fast, with Safari 2 being faster at starting and rendering CSS, but with Opera still being distinguishably faster for rendering tables, scripting and history (especially compared with the much slower Safari 1.2). Camino 0.8 is fast to start, but then it joins its sisters Mozilla and Firefox further down the list. Neither Mozilla, Firefox nor IE perform very well on Mac, being generally slower than on other operating systems.

On Mac OS 9, no single browser stands out as the fastest. In fact, my condolences to anyone who has to use one of them, they all perform badly.