Safari 3.1 on Windows remains the Fastest: Dubious Test Results Overturned

Picture: Arts Technica

Sluggish internet surfing can be especially frustrating and speed, as always, is king. Everyone who uses Safari is impressed by its fast page loading, but is it the fastest as Apple claims? The answer depends both on who you ask, and on what tests you use to determine browser speed. According to the industry standard iBench tests, Safari on Windows is more than double the speed of Internet Explorer 7 and at least 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. This remains unchanged, but there is a new challenger on the horizon in the form of Firefox 3.0 Beta who is reportedly faster than the current champion Safari, according to results from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. The key word here is “reportedly”, because as a closer look by Arts Technical confirms, Safari remains the faster browser.

Firstly, the test in which Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 outpaced Safari compared the stable and official version of Safari 3.1 to a still in development test version of Firefox 3.0. Clearly that is an unfair match up. The people at Arts Technica took it upon themselves to use the latest webkit version of Safari 3.1 to compare against Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 and they threw in the official version for good measure as well. In the results using the same SunSpider Javascript Benchmark, the webkit build fast outperforms Firefox 3b5, as does the official version. However, rather than stopping at only testing Javascript performance as the only benchmark of a browser’s speed as Kingsley Hughes did, the people at Art Technica ran multiple other tests. The results: Safari 3.1 remains the best overall performer and it is clear that Apple’s claims were not dubious marketing tactics, but rather the truth.