Gadgetory

hey guys today I'm here with the latest in my series of web browser comparison tests this time focusing not only on speed but also the interface and features of each browser this time almost every single browser to the field has been updated since my last test with chrome jumping all the way to version 9 quite a few new betas of firefox for complete our first look at internet explorer 9 and alpha of the very promising opera levin and lastly safari five to begin with let's take a look at arguably the most important feature of a browser which is speed i've convinced my normal series of tests down to three so let's begin with the SunSpider javascript benchmark sunspider is a great overall test of javascript speed which is crucial in today's browsers in this test chrome and opera finished in a dead heat with internet explorer 9 putting up a very impressive showing and Safari and Firefox rounding out the rear next I ran all five browsers through the Peacekeeper benchmark Peacekeeper is a great overall browser test that checks a large variety of different factors to determine the scores banking up the previous tests you can see the offer and chrome handily beat all competitors with Safari and Firefox only managing about half the respective scores in internet explorer 9 finishing even further behind the next test iran was the internet explorer 9 fish tank this test relies on html5 and GPU acceleration to anime 500 fish as you might expect internet explorer 9 1 this test however chrome was impressively just a single frame per second behind firefox 4 was behind somewhat even with the recent addition of GPU acceleration however it was still much better than opera which choked along in just a mere three frames per second rounding out the rear with Safari which flat-out refused to run the test at all with 500 fish when just looking at it from the standpoint of speed the clear winner is google chrome of course however speed isn't the only factor when deciding which browser to you so let's move on to the interface of each browser in this test I simply measured how much screen real estate each browser takes up of course each browser is customizable as far as tool bars etc go however here I simply measured how many vertical pixels each browser took two tabs open as you can see Internet Explorer and chrome both did very well only taken 57 and 59 pixels respectively safari did decently as well however the lack of an option to put the tabs up top heard it quite a bit oper light behind due to the info bar on the bottom of the screen which houses many of the unique options to the browser lastly is Firefox which wastes quite a bit of space in order to keep from looking identical to opera moving away from numbers and into my subjective real world experience I've been very impressed with the interface of internet explorer 9 by borrowing the Omni bar from chrome and combining it with the tab bar allows it to both save space and make the browser look and work quite well I was really surprised at how natural it just feels to use while i'm still a big fan of chromes interface compared to internet explorer it really does look at generation behind so this round has to go to ie9 now on to the unique features of each browser since all five are fairly well matched in speed and there isn't a huge difference in the interfaces a lot of the draw for each browser is all about the unique features all my browser's features some sort of add-ons for extensions however the implementations aren't the same in general I'm quite impressed with the chrome extension gallery as it is easy to navigate and let you install extensions quickly it also comes with the plus of not really eating up system resources however extensions are for the most part relegated to the right top side of the browser which is a slight drawback Firefox however does not have that limitation and it also does have the edge on the amount of add-ons available here so really it's a toss-up between chrome and firefox in my opinion the unique features moved beyond that however safari sports a lot of great eye candy in the form of searchable history and new tab page both which add a lot of class and look great to me one of my favorite features in Firefox has to be personas which now come pre-installed in the browser personas allow you to customize the theme of the browser by simply mousing over a theme in the gallery and all you need to do is click on it to install it's a really great feature in my opinion and something I certainly wouldn't mind seeing in other browsers opera has accumulated a huge amount of customization and usability options over the years which are one of its biggest strengths you can spend quite a bit of time tweaking every facet of opera to your liking as well as the navel features such as opera unite and opera turbo Internet Explorer 9 is unsurprisingly full-featured my pick for the best feature however has to be the accelerators which give you a variety of options that appear when you select text letting you translate or map something for example you can install more accelerators as well making this a really really great and useful feature as far as Google Chrome goes instant is one of the best features I've used in quite some time just like Google Instant when you enable instant for Chrome it starts loading websites and searches as you type it greatly increases the speed of web browsing and is on all around excellent feature overall I was very impressed with all five browsers of course there can only be one winner and today that is chrome opera has made major strides in recent months to bridge the gap an Internet Explorer 9 is nothing short of astonishing and you can consider how abysmal it has been for so long in the end though I've got to give it to chrome for offering the best mixture of blistering speed a slick interface and the great support for extensions as well as the wonderful instant feature