Is Safari really the fastest rendering browser for the InterWeb?
By Ben Robinson on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 1:27 PM PST In Apple, Ideas and rants
If you check out Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s webpages on Safari (http://www.apple.com/safari/download/), then you’ll see that they state Safari is “the fastest web browser on any platform”. I have to say, I disagree….
My quandary begins with porting away from IE a number of years ago – it had become some terrible bloatware, that was slow, and non-intuitive. Moving to Firefox, I found that all of a sudden there was a browser that was fast to start, fast to render, had good plug-ins, was free, and also had good add-ins!
Firefox has been my browser of choice for some time, and like most people I visit a subset of websites daily, or at least frequently. More recently, I have been porting to Apple though, and so for purposes of application suite integration, and getting used to a singular UI, I have started using Safari. And this is really where my bugbear comes in.
Firstly, from my daily usage, there is no way that Safari is faster than Firefox – it just isn’t. Testing on websites that have mutli-component homepages, all of which must be loaded and composited, Safari always loses out to Firefox. It’s also slower starting up. And the final “nail in the coffin” is there are more commonly sites that don’t render in Safari, either partly or totally.
My experience has been on both PC and Mac platforms where I run the browsers side by side, although I should say the “delta” between Safari and Firefox is smaller on Mac. Now, let’s take this comparison elsewhere, on to the iPhone. Apple only recently started letting browser-type applications in to App Store, but the de facto browser on iPhone is Safari. And I have to say that running over WiFi, it’s pretty good. It’s only real issues from my perspective are stability, and the occasional quirk on links being “clicked” – when scrolling is being attempted! But, it’s reasonably fast….
Granted, Apple haven’t made a deliberately untrue statement in reference to their own browser – in fact I’m sure in their tests, Safari did come out on top – but, in my real-world usage, Safari isn’t the fastest – on either the PC or Mac platforms. So I’m asking, on either PC, Mac, or Mobile platform – which do you find the fastest browsers, for start-up and rendering? And which have the least issues? My vote is currently for Firefox, with Safari coming in a close second.
[Image via: Apple]
On a pc, FF gets my vote (faithful user for 5 years now).
On a WinMo PPC, SkyFire. On all smart phones, I think Safari and Skyfire are clear favorites, but the WebOS browser appears to beat both handily in the demo videos I have seen.
For the love of God, please stop calling it the InterWeb!
It’s the “World Wide Web” (that uses the Internet.)
The word ‘Interweb’ has its own right for existence when used in a different context (not used with different desktop computer platforms, like Windows and Mac, etc.): it’s when it applies to real web and mobile web. And indeed, Safari’s WebKit proved to be the most efficient choice on many mobile platforms, such as iPhone, Symbian, Android and so forth. That doesn’t mean that the claim is true on desktop, too, though.
When you wrote this, it was about as fast as Firefox, but the Safari 4 beta blows it away. Even the latest Firefox betas are easily bested in speed by the new Safari. Still, the extension ecosystem of Firefox is hard to beat for a lot of folks. Personally, I love the friendly browser war. The fight is now to see who is the fastest and most standards-compliant, not who can drive whom out of business.