This is a test conducted on Windows XP 64 bit edition.

Browsers tested

• Internet Explorer 7
• Opera 9.21
• FireFox 2.0.0.5
• Safari 3.02 for Windows

The test

You need a mouse with scroll wheel to do fast scrolling.

Open each browser and load http://www.jamespaulp.us/.

Open Windows Task Manager. Switch to Processes tab. Make sure Image Name and CPU columns are listed. If not go to the menu View->Select Columns and select CPU Usage column. Click on CPU column header to sort it by CPU Usage. Make sure you are at the top the list by clicking the home button. Keep the task manager window always on top.

Now switch to one browser at a time and start scrolling up and down in quick successions. Just move your finger up and down on the scroll wheel. Watch the CPU usage.

The Result

With Internet Explorer and Opera, you can see the CPU usage climbing above 50% very quickly.

Both FireFox and Safari remains below 10% level all the time.

Now that I have all the popular web browsers on my Windows XP 64 PC, I can do many side by side comparisons. See my previous post for a kind of performance test. Here is another one.

I opened all browsers and opened 5 tabs with same set of pages. Navigated through those sites for a while. Left it open overnight. Browsed a bit more. Set all browsers to the same 5 web pages on each tab. Look at the picture below for memory usage.

Internet Explorer: 136 MB main memory and 300 MB VM Size.

Safari: 78 MB main memory and 83 MB VM Size.

Firefox: 55 MB main memory and 42 MB VM Size.

Opera: 53 MB main memory and 53MB VM Size.

Overall, FireFox is the clear winner here. Based on previous performance test and this test, FireFox is definitely the overall winner. The last time I used FireFox which was more than 2 years ago, my experience with performance was not that good. I stopped using it. Now I see that it improved a lot.

This is a test conducted on Windows XP 64 bit edition.

Browsers tested

• Internet Explorer 7
• Opera 9.21
• FireFox 2.0.0.5
• Safari 3.02 for Windows

The test

You need a mouse with scroll wheel to do fast scrolling.

Open each browser and load http://jamespaulp.wordpress.com/.

Open Windows Task Manager. Switch to Processes tab. Make sure Image Name and CPU columns are listed. If not go to the menu View->Select Columns and select CPU Usage column. Click on CPU column header to sort it by CPU Usage. Make sure you are at the top the list by clicking the home button. Keep the task manager window always on top.

Now switch to one browser at a time and start scrolling up and down in quick successions. Just move your finger up and down on the scroll wheel. Watch the CPU usage.

The Result

With Internet Explorer and Opera, you can see the CPU usage climbing above 50% pretty quickly.

Both FireFox and Safari remains below 10% level all the time.

This is an error message from Safari fow Windows. Also notice that the buttons at the bottom are clipped.