Tim Gaden23 July 2006, 11:30 AM
Macintalk has published the results of its fourth annual browser test, putting Safari, Firefox, Camino, OmniWeb and WebKit through their paces for features, RAM usage, page loading speed and more. The results contain a few surprises.
Macintalk has published the results of its fourth annual browser test, putting Safari, Firefox, Camino, OmniWeb and WebKit through their paces for features, RAM usage, page loading speed and more. The results contain a few surprises.
Predictably Safari turns out to be most sparing on the RAM, followed by Camino and then Firefox. Although the test points out RAM usage figures have little meaning as RAM usage varies so widely according to the number of tabs that are open and the content loaded, OmniWeb seems to use almost twice at much RAM as Safari just after startup.
The real kick is in the speed test. It might be that for some users the RAM-hungry OmniWeb is worth it:
OmniWeb creamed all comers. Safari users will be pleased to see further progress made in WebKit, the nightly builds of a newer Web Kit framework.
Further tests for PDF viewing, standards compliance and RSS features lead the author to conclude:
FireFox is a great browser â€" if you’re using Windows or Linux, that is. On a Mac, you have Safari, WebKit, and OmniWeb to choose from, which are not only more Mac-like, but also faster and more efficient.... In other words: if you’re satisfied with FireFox’s (or Camino’s) performance, or just can’t left go of your 3 million plugins â€" fine … but I still prefer Safari. Life’s too short.