Filed under: Software, Internet, Internet Tools
OS X browser test, fourth edition
After reading this article, I'm simply giddy with self-righteous indignation for all the people who have ever told me I was silly for paying money for a browser. The guys over at macintalk have revived their popular Macintosh browser shootout and re-tested all of the competitors using the latest universal binaries of Firefox, Camino, Safari, WebKit, and the OmniWeb 5.5 beta.
As many of you might expect, Firefox, the PC favorite, lagged behind all other browsers tested in the speed tests, with its sleek sibling Camino not scoring much better. The two gecko browsers also failed to render the Acid2 test properly, while OmniWeb and Safari/WebKit passed with flying colors.
Now, I don't want anyone to get the idea that I'm bashing Firefox and Camino. Camino will always have a place in my dock to handle all of the sites that WebKit can't, but I much prefer OmniWeb for my day-to-day usage, and the test results seem to agree with me.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Rafael said 6:11PM on 7-11-2006
*Downloading OmniWeb*
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Peter Kirn said 6:16PM on 7-11-2006
Hmmm ... where's Opera? It's usually been on par with OmniWeb, and unlike OmniWeb, it's both free and cross-platform. I'd be using it, except I'm somewhat dependent on Firefox's generally superior compatibility and extensions.
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PitMac said 6:22PM on 7-11-2006
where Opera? This is very speed browser for mac and pc.
www.opera.com
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Rob Roark said 6:27PM on 7-11-2006
I just grabbed the latest Webkit build, and while I can't use Saft with it at all (even though when run it shares the preferences, bookmakrs, cookies, etc. as Safari and even says its Safari) it does fix many things that bugged me about Safari.
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Chad said 6:32PM on 7-11-2006
How is OmniWeb faster than WebKit? I thought that the latest version of OmniWeb used WebKit to do its rendering.
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Dan Lurie said 6:38PM on 7-11-2006
OmniGroup tweaks the hell out of webkit.
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fredouil said 6:44PM on 7-11-2006
i am very surprise by this graph, i found omni 5.1 by far slower than firefox, not as conveniant and with a useless adblock/popupblock.
strange
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Matthew Fitzsimmons said 6:49PM on 7-11-2006
I eventually gave up on OmniWeb during the 5.1 days because Safari was so much faster. Now I'm back with OmniWeb (using a 5.5 beta). I love it. Everything I loved was still there, and it's much speedier. I do have a couple of problems with some RoR based sites (Joyent and Strongspace).
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SkylarP said 6:49PM on 7-11-2006
The testers used one of the sneaky peeks of OmniWeb 5.5, which are distinguished for being INSANELY FAST compared to OmniWeb 5.1.
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Tony C said 6:49PM on 7-11-2006
Ran the Acid2 test here...
Passed: Shiira, Opera, Safari, WebKit
Failed: OmniWeb, Firefox (2.0 b1rc3), Camino
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Vince said 6:52PM on 7-11-2006
The comparison is interesting, but not well setup. How general is it? They compared loading speed by loading 1 12.7 MB HTML page. So we see how the browsers perform on that one page. What about other ones? What about pages that I typically visit?
It would be nice if they had evaluated performance on a representative sample of pages.
Loading HTML from local disk is also different from a network connection. Caching? Did they make sure to flush OSX's disk cache? It would've been more interesting if they had setup a webserver on their LAN to serve the page.
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cyberdork said 7:02PM on 7-11-2006
I just tried the sneaky peak of OmniWeb 5.5
WOAH!
Rending digg pages with 100+ comments is soooo much faster than with Safari! Now I'm really looking forward to the next version Safari. I thought those kind of pages were just too heavy for my 1.2GHz G4. But OmniWeb shows that they can be rendered rather fast!
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fredouil said 7:04PM on 7-11-2006
omniweb 5.5 doesnt look to be available anymore, do you have a link, i would like to try a fast version of this browser
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KennyB said 7:16PM on 7-11-2006
OmniWeb 5.5 Download Link for those too lazy to use the Forums
Http://www.omnigroup.com/ftp/pub/software/MacOSX/.sneakypeek
dmg password is "bring your own support" (no quotation marks)
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eM said 7:21PM on 7-11-2006
"Hmmm ... where's Opera?"
Opera makes Omniweb and Safari look as slow as snails and as bloated as whales. It wouldn't do to allow Opera in an article designed to point out the superiority of WebCore/WebKit.
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Clark said 7:39PM on 7-11-2006
Safari is incredibly slow at rendering pages. And forget using tabs, all I get is spinning beach balls.
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fp said 7:44PM on 7-11-2006
I like Opera too. Among all the browers, its support of other text encoding is by far the best.
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seb said 7:46PM on 7-11-2006
Vince,
You deserve at least a star for your comment on the test setup. Skewed article?
Long live TUAW!
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sjk said 7:49PM on 7-11-2006
Re: #13. Not cool posting that info publicly.
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Thomas said 7:53PM on 7-11-2006
Everyones machine is different and so is their browsing styles and needs. You can't claim a browser to be faster than the next unless you do it yourself. Maybe Firefox does great with more memory? Or OmniWeb better on DSL. Who knows? Or maybe it has to do with hard drive space???
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