OSX Web Browser Speed Test Expansion and Redux

By popular demand we added iCab 2.5.2 (Carbon) and Internet Explorer 5.0 (Classic) to our set of web browser speed tests posted on Tuesday. We received a couple of requests to include Apple's discontinued Cyberdog but we have never been able to get it to work.

We had to retest all of the other browsers because several tests showed the previous times to be not compatible, i.e. some aspect of the internet and/or our wireless LAN caused slower times on Wednesday than on Monday night. Many timings were the same, however. We also added the time it took to load Sitelink.Net from clicking on its link on Macs Only!'s sidebar. To reduce the effect of caching on loading web pages, only the time for the first loading is listed. As before, we conducted the tests on a 400 MHz PowerBook 2000 (Pismo) with 512 MB RAM running on a Asante AeroLAN wireless network router (FR3002AL) connected to a cable modem.

Here are the results:

Time in Full Seconds (Mac OS X 10.0.4)

Action	IE 5.0	NC 4.77	IE 5.1.1	iCab 2.5.2	Opera 5.0TP1	OmniWeb 4.0.1
Launch Browser	5	6	15	9	13	13
Scroll Macs Only!	3	3	5	7	8	3
Load SiteLink	4	3	8	13	6	9
Load QuickClicks	7	8	5	5	3	5
Back to Macs Only!	2	1	2	2	2	4

Note that the launch and initial load times for Netscape, Opera and OmniWeb are longer than on Monday night. Opera was particularly slower. The two Classic mode browsers were pretty well matched and both were generally faster than the Mac OS X native (Carbon or Cocoa) browsers. Among the Mac OS X native browsers, iCab consistently launched and loaded Macs Only! faster but Opera was faster on more operations. The fastest at scrolling was OmniWeb.

Our original intent was just to see how Opera fared with timed tests since it seemed to be significantly faster at surfing than any other Mac OS X native browser. The timed tests are not so clear cut but it still seems subjectively that Opera is indeed faster. Unfortunately, in our experience Opera crashes more often while surfing than the others and it more frequently does not initially load all the images on a site. Still Opera is promising and v5.0TP1 is just the first native beta version for Mac OS X.