Fastest browser on the web
Smarter, world’s best, most innovative, more powerful, more customizable: These are claims that are impossible or near impossible to verify.
Fastest, however, is something that can be measured. While not without controversy, benchmarking the speed of a browser is something that can be quantified. So which browser is currently the fastest?
Earlier this year Opera believed it had earned the title “Fastest Browser on Earth” and was duly shot down by DailyTech, while TaranFX confirmed Opera’s claims.
TaranFX only used SunSpider for its tests, in which Opera 10.50 outperformed Chrome 5.0 on Windows. DailyTech’s results of Opera 10.50 on SunSpider correlated with TaranFX’s results. DailyTech uses two other benchmarks to measure how fast a browser can execute JavaScript, namely Futuremark Peacekeeper and Celtic Kane’s JSBenchmark. Chrome 5.0 outperformed Opera 10.50 in these tests.
All three tests: SunSpider, Peacekeeper and JSBenchmark measure a browser’s JavaScript execution speed.
The release of Opera 10.60 finally earned the browser the title of “fastest modern desktop browser.”
But with the development of Internet Explorer (IE) 9, Chrome 6.0 and Firefox 4.0 underway, will Opera retain the crown?
| Browser | Version | SunSpider | JSBenchmark (by Celtic Kane) | Futuremark Peacekeeper |
| Opera | 10.6 | 517.4ms ± 5.7% | 387 ± 0 | 5244 |
| Chrome | 6.0.408.1 | 489.6ms ± 3.9% | 355 ± 0 | 5162 |
| Chrome | 5.0.375.86 | 635.0ms ± 3.6% | 459 ± 0 | 4897 |
| Opera | 10.5 | 353.4ms ± 1.1% | 211 ± 0 | 3323 |
| Safari | 5.0 (7553.16) | 600.4ms ± 1.1% | 252 ± 0 | 2606 |
| Firefox | 4.0 Beta 1 | 777.0ms ± 13.9% | 139 ± 0 | 1976 |
| Firefox | 3.6.4 | 1396.6ms ± 14.6% | 100 ± 0 | 1939 |
| Internet Explorer | 9 (Trial Build 3) | 807.4ms ± 12.1% | 177 ± 0 | 1919 |
| Internet Explorer | 8 | 7228.8ms ± 9.7% | 59 ± 15 | 829 |
(Current stable browsers marked in bold. Browsers under development marked in italics)
The answer, according to DailyTech, seems to be a resounding yes. Opera 10.6 beats Chrome 5.0 in 2 of the benchmarks – SunSpider and Peacekeeper. Opera 10.6 beats Chrome 6.0 in the JSBenchmark and Peacekeeper benchmarks.
Perks of being the fastest
Being the fastest hasn’t seemed to help Opera gain much share of worldwide browser usage. According to NetMarketshare, Opera 10.x browsers accounted for less than 2% of usage in June 2010.
An aggregate score across many sources of usage data available on Wikipedia shows the following usage statistics for June 2010.
| Source | Internet Explorer | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Opera |
| Net Applications | 60.32% | 23.81% | 7.24% | 4.85% | 2.27% |
| W3Counter | 45.50% | 31.80% | 9.20% | 3.50% | 2.10% |
| Stat Counter | 52.86% | 31.15% | 9.24% | 4.07% | 1.91% |
| StatOwl (mainly US) | 63.37% | 21.26% | 6.24% | 8.52% | 0.33% |
| Wikimedia | 47.50% | 30.90% | 7.39% | 4.95% | 3.43% |
| Clicky | 49.44% | 31.16% | 10.30% | 7.64% | 1.25% |
| Mean | 53.17% | 28.35% | 8.27% | 5.59% | 1.88% |
| Median | 51.15% | 31.03% | 8.30% | 4.90% | 2.01% |
One cannot help but conclude from these results that speed matters little. Internet Explorer retains more than half the share of the browser market while the versions currently being used have significantly lower benchmarks than any other browser.
Looking at usage share over time (not pictured here) it’s interesting to see that IE has steadily lost market share while Chrome and Firefox have gained.
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