The Loading Speed Of The Different Browsers

In these days we have several possibilities how we can browse the internet.

Many different browsers are available for free.

I made some tests with the 5 major browsers and one oldie on my Windows XP Professional machine in the office.

The terms for the different browsers are:

AMD Phenom 9650 Quad Core CPU

4GB RAM

20MBit down- / 1MBit upstream Cable internet connection

What Is Affecting The Loading Time Of A Website?

We know that many different circumstances can affect the loading time of a website. No, they are affecting the loading time.

Let’s say you are at home and your wife/husband/boyfriend… let’s just say partner/kid/parents are listening to an online radio or surfing, voip, p2p, torrents, watching a youtube clip, …

This is affecting the download stream of everyone else using the same internet connection, and it is affecting the upload stream as well.

In the office are 7-9 people working with voip, email, online research,… the server is uploading/downloading emails, connecting to our webservers, …

Summary:

Every system/program connected to the internet sending/receiving traffic (slow or fast) is affecting the loading time of a website.

But there is something else that is affecting the loading time. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) …

The routing from your computer to the website you want to open is also a factor that counts. If there is trouble with the routing you maybe can not open the website or it is really slow.

The distance from your computer to the webserver that is serving the site you want to open is affecting the loading time, too.

If you live in Germany and you are opening a website that is getting served from a german webserver you should be able to watch it very fast.

If you live in Germany and you are opening a website in Japan that is getting served from a japanese webserver you shoul be able to… wait some more time, if you are unlucky. Maybe only 1 second, maybe more.

There are several other things that can affect the loading time. One is the browser itself.

Every browser is rendering the site and executing the javascript (if there is any, the two sites I used for testing uses JavaScript) in it’s own way with their different browser engines. If you have plugins/extensions installed that are connecting to the internet (like most of the SEO related ones) then your browser will be even slower.

You can read some more about the different browsers and their engines at this Wikipedia site.

The Test

The test itself is not spectacular. I am running 2 different sites in a “website loading time comparing” script. It is a client-side script so it uses my own bandwidth.

This script can be run in “repeat mode” and that’s what I did. Repeat the loading of those two sites 24 times.

After completion it shows me the “Winner” and the average loading time for each website.

For the test I’ve chose the following sites:

- google.de

- a site we (my trainee and me) have coded

Okay, some stuff about the sites itself. I’ve chosen google.de because it is the main search engine we use at the office… and it’s pretty fast. The Google Page Speed score is 95/100.

You all know the google start pages… I don’t need to explain it, no?

The site we have coded has:

- a jQuery slider - this one from CoDrops and modified a bit

- CSS and JavaScript combined and minified (1 CSS file and 1 JavaScript file)

- more content then the google.de start page

- all static content (CSS/JavaScript/images) served from a cookieless domain, static content is served gziped

- Google Page Speed score 98/100

Now the time has come – Showdown