Compelled by an office friend, Mac user, who boats about the speed of his Internet browser almost every other day, I finally did a short research on browser performance. And I have to admit it was quite shocking find out, even for a heavy Internet user like me, that the speed difference between the fastest (Safari) and the most commonly used browser (Firefox) may be as high as 4x.

According to CNET UK, this is the performance comparison of the most common browsers:

The test doesn’t include FX 3.5 which was just released and is noticably faster than its precedessor, but I wouldn’t expect any change in the Top 3.

It’s also good to realize, that while an average web server hardly ever crunches the average, dynamic web site in more than 1-2 seconds, it may still take over 3 times this much to display that web page on your computer. Even with so much computing power on the client end these days!

One thing is sure - the majority of the web relies on JavaScript, and this doesn’t seem to change. So those browser makers who have re-engineered their JS engines will get the edge. Times when we had to wait half a minute to load up a page have passed years ago, but the funny part is, that it’s often not the Internet being the bottleneck now, it’s our own personal computer…