The web browser today seems almost more important than the operating system you use since most browsers are on more than one platform. I ran some speed tests a couple of weeks ago.

These speed stats were what I found.

#1 Opera 10.53 – 299.2ms
#2 Chrome 5.0.375.38 beta – 308.0ms
#3 FireFox 3.6 – 727.4ms

Opera is used by less than 2% of the internet. Yet it has the fastest performance online. They also have very fast mobile web browsing. I have been using it more frequently, but I do seem to use Google’s Chrome as my default web browser. As for Firefox is still a fun browser, but it takes twice as long to get a page to load compared to Chrome and Opera so it isn’t my ideal browser of choice anymore.

I was using firefox pretty much exclusively for the last 2 to 3 years. I liked how fast it was and the extensions there were, and the large community behind Firefox, but I tried Chrome Beta for a week back in Jan or Feb and I liked it so much that I’m using it all the time now. The extensions are just as good if not better than Firefox’s and the load time with the extensions is still pretty amazing. Google really knows what they are doing.

I know some of you are probably thinking how can you mention web browsers without mentioning the gremlin called Internet Explorer. Well I’ll tell you how come I didn’t mention it. It’s slow outdated and not as useful as it was back in 2002-2003. I do however use IE8 for developing for the IE people. I also use microsoft’s expressions for the web so I test backwards compatibility for IE7 and IE6. So it’s not too bad dealing with the older internet people. All IE users are probably used to a slower internet experience anyway.

I might get more excited about IE9 when it comes out. It appears to be in a rough state right now. I haven’t really messed around with the IE9 beta. I actually don’t use windows anymore at home, as I have a mac computer, and a linux based netbook.

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