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rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Browser bruiser: Opera 9.5 versus Firefox 3

Two of the four major browsers have undergone some big changes in the past two weeks. Firefox 3 is, of course, the big news of the week, pulling down eight million or so downloads in its first 24 hours in the wild. However, the Opera browser updated to its much-awaited version 9.5 last week. Since both of them have got game but for different reasons, let's take a look at how they match up.

Empirically, the two most-cited complaints about browsers are speed and memory. Now, I'm a big fan of Firefox because it's so easy to customize, so despite concerns I had about placing both browsers on "equal footing," it would be misleading to test Firefox devoid of extensions, so I left in my cadre of add-ons, and ran both with fifteen tabs open--a more or less standard browsing session for me.

More here

sunny

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Using the SunSpider JavaScript test, Firefox 3 scored around 5500 microseconds to process the tested scripts, with a margin of error at around three percent. Opera 9.5 scored about 7280 microseconds on the same test, with a margin of error around 1.5 percent, making it nearly one and a third times as slow as Firefox 3. This isn't surprising, given how long Opera's been using the same rendering engine. Assuming they get to Opera 10 before Mozilla puts out Firefox 4, it would be interesting to go back and re-compare them.

sunny

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Firefox used approximately 127 MB RAM with the 15 tabs open, while Opera used around 117 MB. This was a little bit surprising, since Opera is definitely running on the older code. It might be attributable to the various extensions I use in Firefox, but it's more likely that despite the claimed 15,000 fixes deployed in Firefox 3, there's still quite a bit of room to plug those memory leaks.

sunny

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

You can discount this entire article. The author has no clue what he's doing or saying. First, he can't compare his copy of Firefox with Opera if his copy of Firefox isn't a standard install. He admits and discounts the idea that he is using a modded version of Firefox, so his test is completely worthless...

Second, he claims that Opera is using old code in its rendering engine. This shows how clueless he is. The Opera rendering engine code is completely new too as several of the responders correctly pointed out:

So this author ran an unscientific test avoiding scientific methods and made false claims that can be easily disproved. Why would anyone bother believing anything he said with these glaring flaws in his article???

dontknow