Apple have trumpeted Safari as “the fastest web browser on any platform” which is quite a bold claim. Considering that Apple has been in trouble for dubious performance claims of its products in the past, I was wondering how much weight their latest claim really had.
In my previous post where I took a first look at Safari I noted that I’d not seen any blistering performance gains, so with Apple’s claim still echoing in my ears, I thought I’d do a simple benchmark of Safari and Firefox. Now - before I get shot down in flames about my methodology I’d like to point out that I know its not exactly the most scientific way of doing things! This is just a very quick and dirty 10 minute comparison of the speed of Safari vs Firefox to test my gut reaction; there are a lot of variables that might be having a positive or negative effect on the results that were out of my control, so don’t take this as definitive!
This test used Safari 522.11.3 and Firefox 2.0.0.4 (in safe mode) on a copy of XP pro SP2, on a standard residential (and pretty poor in all ways) ADSL connection. With each browser I made 3 visits to google.co.uk, ebay.co.uk, news.bbc.co.uk, digg.com, mdibb.co.uk, and just for fun I threw in the Safari start page and the Firefox start page to see if there were any obvious browser-specific optimisations. Using the output from Wireshark, I recorded the time taken between the first HTTP GET, and the final HTTP GET for each forced-refresh of the page.
Please forgive the image - click on it to get a CSV copy of the results. Wordpress apparently has no support for HTML Tables or uploading non-image files! The values are in seconds, with the final column showing the Safari loading time as a percentage of the Firefox benchmark (i.e. >100 means Safari was slower than Firefox)
The results pretty much agreed with my gut feeling on the issue - Safari is on average slightly slower than Firefox for me in this quick and dirty benchmark. Curiously it was wildly faster than Firefox when loading the BBC’s news page and to a lesser extent this site - ideas on a postcard please!
Safari is certainly quicker to load for me though, but I suspect that has a lot to do with too many extensions! Maybe if I get time I’ll do a big benchmark using Opera and Internet Explorer too - and maybe I will come up with a more robust testing methodology too!