Finally, browser performance is better on the Mac
Everybody that makes a browser claims theirs is the fastest, but which of any of them is telling the truth? When it comes to speed is Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Internet Explorer truly tops or is there realy no effective way to measure this ill defined concept?
Quoting data from FutureMark’s new Peacekeeper benchmarking suite, Daily Tech reports we can name a winner, if only for a short time, in the browser performance sweepstakes.
How accurate is this test suite? Well, whereas Peacekeeper does test for HTML 5, CSS, DOM and JavaScript, no testing of Flash””an area where Adobe has kept the Mac at a disadvantage for years and years. Still for the benchmark matrix available to testers, browsers running on the fairer platform tend to perform better.
“The Apple [computers] tend to be 5-10 percent faster [than Windows machines],” said FutureMark President Oliver Baltuch. “We believe that is based on the middleware of the OS. We believe that it is more streamlined.”
Specifically, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome””both of which are WebKit-based””outperform not Internet Explorer, which is widely regarded as lagging in nearly every measure, but also Opera and Firefox.
Flash is dead, long live HTML 5!
Nevertheless, FutureMakr’s Baltuch says he uses Opera 10.0 beta 2 for browsing because he likes the user interface and features the best. He also praised Mozilla users for their very helpful feedback and, of course, Firefox and its variants stand head and shoulders above the crowd vis-a-vis extensibility and developer support.
As always, the 800lbs gorilla in the room is Flash performance, which is for no good reason still better on Windows than it is on the Mac. That said, Apple’s aversion to Flash on the iPhone and hard work to drive HTML 5 and JavaScript development across the mobile, portable and desktop platforms really come into perspective.
So, while we enjoy a significant margin of performance superiority vis-a-vis HTML 5, CSS, DOM and JavaScript on the Mac, now maybe’s a good to voluntarily dump Flash or only enable on an as needed basis? I can’t be alone in wishing Adobe’s bloated multimedia web middleware a speedy demise…
What’s your take?
August 11th, 2009
I agree… Flash needs to go. With HTML 5, CSS 3, and Javascript, why do we still need flash in the browser?
I think with the coming of Google’s Chrome OS, and all the other advances in web standards, flash will eventually be fazed out, even for video use.
August 12th, 2009
I’m having frequent glitches on safari. No idea why. I’ll be loading a website, then all of a sudden it freezes and closes down!?