Just a few weeks ago Futuremark, a company known for creating benchmark programs for Windows computers (3DMark and PCMark), released a new benchmark called “Peacekeeper“. Peacekeeper tests various browser functions such as JavaScript arrays, DOM functionality, rendering and other things often used by today’s modern websites like YouTube, Facebook and GMail.

Why would you need a browser benchmark? The better a browser performs on your system, the faster websites are shown and can interactively been used. This is especially needed when browsing Web 2.0 websites, and on low-end PCs such as netbooks the difference can really be a barrier. I experienced this using my favourite browser Firefox 3.0 on my Asus Eee PC 900: When typing and address into the address bar, the “intelligent search” feature needs so much computing power that the whole browser is stuck. Also using GMail or Facebook doesn’t make fun when you have to wait for a second before you can click, scroll, type, etc… That’s why I switched to Google Chrome. Jukka Mäkinen, Head of PC Products and Services at Futuremark, said:

“People have more choice now in how they experience the internet than ever before. But they may not realize that performance between browsers can vary dramatically, especially on lower-end PCs. With Peacekeeper, it’s simple to compare different browsers and see which one offers the best performance on your PC.”

Benchmark your browser now using Peacekeeper!

I compared all the major browsers on my computer (Pentium 4 3.2GHz with Hyper-Threading, onboard S3 graphics) and got quite interesting results:

[poll id="6"]

As expected, Internet Explorer is performing the worst, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. An interesting fact is that the old IE 6 is running slightly faster than IE 7.

To my surprise, Firefox is second to last. I  never thought that Firefox would be the fastest browser on earth, but didn’t expect it to be so slow compered to Chrome and Safari. But using the future versions of Firefox (version 3.1 beta and 3.6 alpha), there is a drastic increase in performance. Enough reason to see forward to the release of these versions!

The test clearly shows Chrome’s superiority over Firefox in means of performance, as I already experienced on my netbook.

But I never expected Safari to be that fast, especially since it is designed to run on Mac and not on Windows. Perhaps I should consider using it on my computers from now on, if it has the features I need (saving tabs, plugins like Ad-Block Plus, …).

I also tried to benchmark Konqueror, the default browser on Linux systems using KDE, but Konqueror refused to start the test (I was using version 5.1 of Knoppix on Live CD).

More about how Peacekeeper works:
http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/faq.action

More about Futuremark:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuremark