Not really a reliable test, but imagine loading this home page in a normal browser. I say this is pretty much of a big-ass simple test for comparing Safari and Firefox 3. Googling gave me no comparison between Gran Paradiso (Firefox 3’s codename) and the newest version of Safari in Leopard, so I tried it myself using the simplest way I could do.

My home page pretty gives all the stress a browser could get: YouTube and MySpace videos embedded, images, HTML DIV sections, ads, Google Analytics, Wordpress Analytics, and a bunch of Javascript from my widgets. Here are the results:

From the looks of it, I guess both fair well when it comes to memory usage (Safari, I think, is using its native Webkit framework, so it comes out already preloaded, thus the low real memory and vsize, but I don’t really know if that’s the case, so please bear with me), and as for load time, Safari loaded my page around 13.5 secs, while Firefox did it at a close 13.7 secs. I was actually testing Gran Paradiso yesterday, and, apart from the surprise crashes (when I load GMail and network is down), I should say I’m pretty impressed the Firefox team has done it again, even though they don’t really win in the performance side of things.

But you know, I still use Firefox not because it’s the fastest browser in the planet (some pages load faster in Firefox, but most of them run faster in Safari), but because of the plugins I get from it. This blog post, for example, is written using ScribeFire, a wordpress / generic blogs plugin for Firefox, not to mention I can browse pages a lot cleaner through Firefox than in Safari (some divs are “misplaced”, etc., but this is arguable because Safari is Acid-test compliant while Firefox isn’t yet).

You can download Firefox 3, Beta 1 here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Malupet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.