- Chrome Vs Firefox
So now that Chrome has made it’s entrance, what exactly has it brought to its users? Sure it’s backed by Google, but does that give Chrome the lead it needs to convert die hard Firefox users? This article will answer this very important question by comparing Firefox and Chrome on various different levels and determining if the difference is truly enough to warrant a change.
Let us first look at something that you’re guaranteed to use at least once a day: Javascript. The new Chrome browser boasts a new revision of JS 8 and claims it’s superior to any other version out currently. The way both browsers have been benchmarked is by calling various internal functions and timing how long it took for each to return. The time it took to process all the functions was then recorded and compared. The reason this benchmark works is because it tests the internal of the Javascript Engine and when compared would reveal which browser would process and execute web pages with AJAX and Javascript faster.
The results did in fact back up Google’s claim. Firefox executed all functions in a total time of 5615.0ms and Chrome executed all functions in a total time of 3375.6ms. Comparing these two reveals that Chrome is 1.66 times faster when it comes to Javascript. Does this make a difference? Well an average AJAX application can run more than 100 internal function calls and this can add up to quite a few seconds saved by using Chrome. Not to mention the faster an application executes the better the results are.
The next vital thing to compare is the browser’s memory usage. This is how much system memory the browser is using. The more tabs open generally the more memory being used. Google has not specifically claimed that Chrome has any boosts in this area, but it’s still very important to compare.
To do the comparing we are going to open the average number of tabs a user usually has open which is around six. We’ll do this for both Chrome and Firefox and then compare the memory usage of each browser. Each tab will have the exact same website opened for both browsers including one web application which uses Flash. While performing this test Firefox yields a value of 146mb of system memory used. Chrome yields a value of 143mb of system memory used. Is this significant? Hardly. When talking in terms of RAM generally a computer has anywhere from 1 to 4 GB of RAM space. Thus when comparing only 3 MB, this is hardly a difference. Furthermore one must always give or take a few Mega Bytes to cover any human error so in reality Chrome and Firefox may be using the same amount of system memory.
The final most important aspect of a browser is the speed with which it requests and renders a page. In order to do this I will use a page with a fast server response time but filled with a lot of content and images. I found that the best place for this was doing a Google image search. Each search yields 20 images per page and other typical content like tables, CSS, etc.
- The browser market
After a few runs with each browser I came to a mean of .456ms for Chrome and .987ms for Firefox. Is this significant? Well when browsing multiple pages these milliseconds easily add up. Already a person with Chrome can save a few seconds when browsing multiple pages. In effect Chrome nearly doubles Firefox’s rendering time.
After reviewing all of this criteria it seems that indeed Chrome has an advantage over Firefox. Two of the three tests yielded significant differences and both were extremely important when it comes to browsing the web. It’s important to note that Chrome is still in its Beta stages while Firefox is already on version 3+. It seems there’s some tension building and it’s only a matter of time before Chrome really makes it’s presence in the browser war.
