I had been using Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7 for sometime now. Recently I decided to try other browsers just to see the difference and possibly choose the fastest and most convenient for my needs. I tried Mozilla, which I noticed was faster than both IE and Netscape. Opera is the latest browser which I tried.

I would like to share the results and details as follows:

Being an audiophile I regularly visit Andrew’s Hifi pages, which is one of the most detailed web pages that I have come across when it comes to audio and due to immense detail on the page it always takes time to load. I decided to use this very page for my test.

The results are as follows:

Internet Explorer 6 (with SP1) = 1m 35s
Netscape 7.02 = 1m 20s
Mozilla 1.3.1 = 1m 00s
Opera (7.11) = 0m 40s

Obviously my connection is not very fast but I would be very interested to know if others also get similar results. If you have a connection ten times faster, than you should get the times 1/10th of what I got and so on and so forth.

Here is the link to the Audio Website

In case you wish to try out a particular browser (other than the default IE) the link to the latest browsers is as follows:

Opera

Mozilla

Netscape

Come back with your opinion if you do try it and find a particular one to be fast or convenient to use. Your feedback can help others!

Interesting, I also decided to try this out on a few browsers.

Firebird (2003-05-29 build) - 8s 19ms
Firebird (2003-05-30 unofficial with aggressive optimizations) - 7s 74ms
Mozilla (1.4 RC1 nightly) - 7s 80ms
Opera (7.11) - 6s 18ms
IE6 SP1 - 5s 74ms

It seemed very odd to me that IE6 was the fastest, and I did the test several times. Keep in mind the cache was emptied before each test.

I was expecting Opera to be first with Firebird close behind. Hmmm...

In everyday use, Firebird still appears to be the fastest. I know Opera is technically faster, but it doesn't render a lot of things properly and I just despise the interface. Firebird has been my default browser for quite some time now.

In other news, seems as though standalone developpment of IE has stopped and IE6 SP1 will be the last standalone version.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...s/ie/ie0507.asp